Terrascope is a learning community for first-year students to solve complex, real-world problems starting in their first semester at MIT.

At the core of Terrascope is one basic but important idea: students, even in their first year, are ready to take control of their own education and tackle big, important problems. Every year Terrascope explores a different issue, and it’s the students who take command. They work in teams to develop solutions, drawing on diverse perspectives,  interdisciplinary research and the resources of the Terrascope community. Along the way, they develop the real-world skills necessary to address sustainability-related challenges, and they learn about how to organize teams around complex problems of any kind.