Building electric guitars is not part of the typical high-school physics curricu­lum, but it's one of the many things that students can learn to do at a new MIT site launched as an expansion of the Institute's ­OpenCourseWare (OCW) project. Highlights for High School, which President Susan ­Hockfield announced in November, is designed to help high-school students and instructors supplement their coursework with MIT resources. The site offers materials developed by MIT students, along with selections from MIT's OCW site--which features audio and video lectures and class assignments from more than 1,800 MIT courses.

The site points students to introductory courses at MIT and to segments of MIT courses corresponding to material covered in Advanced Placement exams. An estimated 5,000 U.S. high-school students already visit the OCW site each month.

Other enhancements to OCW are in the works, including a lecture search tool developed at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab that could help students find specific information in audio and video lectures.