Children have played games since the dawn of humankind, representing ways in which they had fun, socialized, learned norms, and collaborated—establishing social expectations, experiencing independence, creativity, and pushing behavioral boundaries. This course introduces anthropology (especially socio-cultural anthropology) as a field of study, applying it to understand the nature of play and games in various cultures/societies in diverse geographical regions and eras. We ask about the nature of childhood and play, and how similar games are realized in different ways—and what this tells us about other (and our own!) cultures. Students should come to class open to learning about other cultures and reading from challenging, scholarly materials.

In this course students will have the opportunity to delve into chemical engineering process design in order to understand the scope and impact of process design on the world. Chemical engineering is inherently interdisciplinary and has many applications in pharmaceuticals, energy generation, food and consumer products. How are ice cream bars made? Plastic bags, shampoo? How are these processes and factories designed? Where do the waste materials end up (life cycle analysis)? The course will introduce students to the holistic analysis of an industrial process, and teach them soft skills of communication for conducting meetings, presentations, and working on teams.

As one of the best-selling toys of all time, Erno Rubik’s enigmatic cube has befuddled and entranced countless minds, permanently frustrating some and deeply inspiring others. Immediately recognizable to nearly everyone on Earth, it sets forth an intuitive challenge: put the scrambled cube back into its fully ordered state, where all like colors align with one another. However, this simple premise belies the rich mathematical complexity behind this object. The cube is a tangible example of one of the most powerful mathematical structures: a group. Combinations of moves and rotations permute the pieces in different ways, with the possibility of combining and reducing moves to construct more optimal solutions. In this course, we will learn the fundamental concepts of group theory and combinatorics, using the cube as a motivator for readings, discussions, and problems. Along the way, we will explore how results of group theory and combinatorics manifest in the cube. By the end, students will be able to prove that a cube can exist in over 43 quintillion states, compare different methods of solving, use group theory to construct their own algorithms, and learn how mathematicians proved that any scrambled cube can be solved in twenty moves or fewer - and why it took them over 30 years to do so.

Artificial intelligence has critical ethical, psychological, and social implications. Applications abound for healthcare, security, e-government and the public sector, transportation, logistics, education-with new applications appearing all the time. A.I. technologies impact fairness and equity, job displacement, potential erroring and misuse by malevolent actors, privacy, and security. In this course we enter this new world, helping you to navigate the challenges. We'll learn about how A.I. works, explore applications, and apply ethics-from classical philosophical theories to modern ethics of technology-to these new concerns. We'll also ask if A.I. can ever achieve consciousness.

The emergence of new media and spreading of information that changes everything. New utopias, new forms of freedom, globalization, wars, pandemics and apocalyptic anguishes. Are these exclusively twenty-first-century archetypes? Not quite. The men and women of the Renaissance lived through it all. This course will allow students to experience one of the richest periods in the history of Western culture, refracted through several lenses of humanistic scholarship. Aside from making connections across academic disciplines of art history, literature, comparative philosophy, religious studies, theatre, and history, students will explore the various ways our prosperous twenty-first century resembles Renaissance life.