When Freesia Gaul discovered MIT Open Learning\u2019s OpenCourseWare at just 14 years old, it opened up a world of learning far beyond what her classrooms could offer. Her parents had started a skiing company, and the seasonal work meant that Gaul had to change schools every six months. Growing up in small towns in Australia and Canada, she relied on the internet to fuel her curiosity.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went to 13 different schools, which was hard because you’re in a different educational system every single time,\u201d says Gaul. \u201cThat\u2019s one of the reasons I gravitated toward online learning and teaching myself. Knowledge is something that exists beyond a curriculum.\u201d<\/p>\n
The small towns she lived in often didn\u2019t have a lot of resources, she says, so a computer served as a main tool for learning. She enjoyed engaging with Wikipedia, ultimately researching topics and writing and editing content for pages. In 2018, she discovered\u00a0MIT OpenCourseWare<\/a>, part of\u00a0MIT Open Learning<\/a>, and took her first course. OpenCouseWare offers free, online, open educational resources from more than 2,500 MIT undergraduate and graduate courses.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI really got started with the OpenCourseWare introductory electrical engineering classes, because I couldn\u2019t find anything else quite like it online,\u201d says Gaul, who was initially drawn to courses on circuits and electronics, such as 6.002<\/a> (Circuits and Electronics) and 6.01SC<\/a> (Introduction to Electrical Engineering and Computer Science). \u201cIt really helped me in terms of understanding how electrical engineering worked in a practical sense, and I just started modding things.\u201d<\/p>\n In true MIT\u00a0\u201cmens et manus\u201d (\u201cmind and hand\u201d) fashion, Gaul spent much of her childhood building and inventing, especially when she was able to access a 3D printer. She says that a highlight was when she built a life-sized, working version of a Mario Kart, constructed out of materials she had printed.<\/p>\n Gaul calls herself a \u201cserial learner,\u201d and has taken many OpenCourseWare courses. In addition to classes on circuits and electronics, she also took courses in linear algebra, calculus, and quantum physics \u2014 in which she took a particular interest.\u00a0<\/p>\n When she was 15, she participated in\u00a0Qubit by Qubit<\/a>. Hosted by The Coding School, in collaboration with universities (including MIT) and tech companies, this two-semester course introduces high schoolers to quantum computing and quantum physics.\u00a0<\/p>\n During that time she started a blog called On Zero, representing the \u201czero state\u201d of a qubit. \u201cThe \u2018zero state\u2019 in a quantum computer is the representation of creativity from nothing, infinite possibilities,\u201d says Gaul. For the blog, she found different topics and researched them in depth. She would think of a topic or question, such as \u201cWhat is color?\u201d and then explore it in great detail. What she learned eventually led her to start asking questions such as \u201cWhat is a hamiltonian?\u201d and\u00a0teaching<\/a> quantum physics alongside PhDs.<\/p>\n Building on these interests, Gaul chose to study quantum engineering at the University of New South Wales. She notes that on her first day of university, she participated in\u00a0iQuHack<\/a>, the MIT Quantum Hackathon. Her team worked to find a new way to approximate the value of a hyperbolic function using quantum logic, and received an honorable mention for \u201cexceptional creativity.\u201d<\/p>\n Gaul\u2019s passion for making things continued during her college days, especially in terms of innovating to solve a problem. When she found herself on a train, wanting to code a personal website on a computer with a dying battery, she wondered if there might be a way to make a glove that can act as a type of Bluetooth keyboard \u2014 essentially creating a way to type in the air. In her spare time, she started working on such a device, ultimately finding a less expensive way to build a lightweight, haptic, gesture-tracking glove with applications for virtual reality (VR) and robotics.<\/p>\n Gaul says she has always had an interest in VR, using it to create her own worlds, reconstruct an old childhood house, and play Dungeons and Dragons with friends. She discovered a way to put into a glove some small linear resonant actuators, which can be found in a smartphone or gaming controller, and map to any object in VR so that the user can feel it.<\/p>\n