Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Geiger Counters
A hands-on introduction to nuclear science offered during MIT's Independent Activities Period, a short January term for undergraduates. Students build their own Geiger counter from scratch and use it to detect and measure radiation from different sources, testing how shielding materials block or attenuate the signal. The course covers the physics of radioactive decay and detection, methods for counting particle activity accurately, and a look at how radiation measurements can be applied to cryptography. Materials on MIT OpenCourseWare include lecture notes, lab instructions, and build guides for the counter itself, aimed at being accessible to first-year students while still covering real experimental rigor. No certificate is offered, consistent with MIT OCW's open materials model. The course carries an explicit safety warning given the radioactive sources and equipment involved in the hands-on labs.