At 14, Freesia Gaul stumbled upon MIT OpenCourseWare, a discovery that would reshape her education. Growing up in small towns across Australia and Canada, she moved schools every six months due to her parents’ seasonal skiing business. “I went to 13 different schools,” she recalls. “That’s why I leaned into online learning. Knowledge isn’t confined to a classroom.”
The lack of resources in her communities meant a computer became her main tool for learning. She spent hours on Wikipedia, editing pages and researching topics that sparked her curiosity. In 2018, she found MIT OpenCourseWare, a repository of free courses from over 2,500 MIT classes. “The electrical engineering courses were a game-changer,” she says. “They helped me understand circuits in a way I’d never imagined.”
Read Also: MIT program opens doors to new possibilities
Gaul’s hands-on approach mirrored MIT’s “mens et manus” philosophy—combining theory with practice. At 14, she built a life-sized Mario Kart using a 3D printer. By 15, she was blogging about quantum computing, a passion that led her to a startup incubator. Her blog, On Zero, explored questions like “What is color?” and “What is a Hamiltonian?”—topics she later discussed with PhDs.
She enrolled in quantum engineering at the University of New South Wales, where she joined iQuHack, an MIT-hosted hackathon. Her team’s work on approximating hyperbolic functions earned an honorable mention. But Gaul’s interests extended beyond theory. On a train with a dying laptop battery, she wondered: “What if I could type in the air?”
That question led to a glove prototype using linear resonant actuators from smartphone parts. The device, which maps gestures to virtual objects, won the People’s Choice award at SxSW Sydney 2025. It also inspired her to co-found On Zero, a startup focused on accessible VR and robotics tools.
Gaul’s work aims to expand creative freedom. “The mind is just such a fun thing,” she says. “I want to empower others to follow their curiosity, even if it seems pointless.” Her journey, she notes, was possible because of MIT’s free courses. “They gave me the foundation to solve problems I’d never imagined.”
She’s now refining the glove’s design, aiming to make it lighter and more affordable. For now, the prototype sits in her dorm room—a testament to what happens when curiosity meets opportunity. The address on the MIT website, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, USA, feels worlds away from the small towns where Gaul’s story began.