Spring 2026 Course Search

For students doing work-study or internships, we will focus on three core areas of professionalization. First, each week will journal our work weeks, discussing and sharing our work experiences in a round-table. Second, we will build our professionalization skills, especially networking (in person and on LinkedIn), resume writing, and doing practice interviews. Finally, we will work on writing 5-year plans, to help us figure out where we’d like to be a few years after graduation. More specifically

Following up on the fall course on web3, this course helps students learn to track transactions and actions across blockchains, which are large distributed censorship resistant databases. The course starts by exploring the fundamental nature of the blockchain: how data is stored, accessed, and traversed. It then introduces common patterns and software used for blockchain analytics.

An herbarium is a museum of pressed plants, a record of flora following a system that dates back to the 16th century. Large herbaria at institutions like D.C.’s Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Chicago’s Field Museum, Cambridge’s Harvard University, and London’s Kew Gardens contain millions of specimens, collected from around the world. But, most herbaria are small herbaria, with less than 10,000 specimens.

This course will provide knowledge and skills to offer effective education to students with a range of learning and behavioral characteristics, in a variety of settings. Emphasis will be placed on building an equitable environment for all ages and grades, preK-12, to implement in the future. We will consider how to structure classrooms and plan teaching that is conducive to meeting diverse needs, including those of students with disabilities and English language learners.

How can we create machines that think, learn, and solve problems? This course explores the fascinating field of artificial intelligence (AI), introducing the fundamental concepts, techniques, and ethical considerations that drive this rapidly evolving discipline.

Building upon your programming knowledge, you will explore key AI paradigms including search algorithms, evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence, and machine learning.  You will implement AI solutions to real-world problems, and gain an understanding of how to think about contemporary AI development.

Introduces the fundamentals of guitar playing, including: posture, hand positions, tuning, chords, strumming, finger-picking, songs and tunes, major scales, and beginning to read music. History of the guitar and its past and current artists will be shared.

Instrumental Study on Guitar. Continued studies from Beginning Guitar. Advanced study in fret-board harmony and theory, play in different tunings, increase chord vocabulary and repertoire.

A comprehensive course in learning musical skills on the ukulele. We will learn the history of the uke, from its Portuguese and Indigenous Hawaiian origins, and both traditional and contemporary styles. Music theory and playing techniques will be learned and practiced. Awareness of traditional styles of playing the instrument will be furthered through a listening component and ensemble playing with other instrumentalists. Repertoire will be drawn from traditional and original Hawaiian songs, as well as contemporary music from the past 60 years.

Theoretical Ethics aims to uncover the sources of moral knowledge and the foundations of moral obligation. You will engage in a detailed reading of two classical moral theories and study contemporary interpretations and applications of these theories. You will be expected to contribute substantially to class discussion, write two essays and present a draft of your final essay to the class.

Celtic history and music from Ireland, Scotland, Bretagne, Galatia, and Cape Breton will be experienced, studied, and performed using instruments and voices. We’ll find and cross the musical bridges between regions–from the ballads of Ireland, Scotland and Wales to the Alalas of Spain, through the Scottish Gaelic speaking Highland and Islands to the dance tunes of Brittany. An end-of-term presentation will be prepared drawing on inspiration from traditional forms.

Everything is geometry! This class is about two things: first, about how mathematicians have extended the concept of "geometry" beyond triangles and circles, into higher-dimensional spaces, curved spaces, spaces of functions, discrete spaces, and more. Second, about how this extension of "geometry" can allow us to apply our powerful geometric intuition to a wide range of problems that might not initially seem geometric, both within mathematics, and in physics, computer science, and elsewhere.

In this course, we will focus on developing the statistical skills needed to answer questions by collecting data, designing experimental studies, and analyzing large publicly available datasets. The skills learned will also help students to be critical consumers of statistical results. We will use a variety of datasets to develop skills in data management, analysis, and effective presentation of results.

Discrete mathematics studies problems that can be broken up into distinct pieces. Some examples of these sorts of systems are letters or numbers in a password, pixels on a computer screen, the connections between friends on Facebook, and driving directions (along established roads) between two cities. In this course we will develop the tools needed to solve relevant, real-world problems. Topics will include: combinatorics (clever ways of counting things), number theory and graph theory. Possible applications include probability, social networks, optimization, and cryptography.

Feminism imagines a world free of gender-based oppression and injustice. But what exactly does such freedom involve? In this course, we’ll investigate the interplay between gender, feminist theory, and philosophical views about freedom. Some prompting questions include: Is individual freedom enough? What does ubiquitous pornography mean for sexual freedom? How does politics shape desire? (How) should we rethink the family and work? Does feminist freedom require freedom from gender?

Accessibility describes the practice of freeing a space or an event so it might be visited by more people in more ways than one could ever presume at the outset. In this course, we will explore the litany of practices that allow more people (and in particular, disabled, mad, and chronically ill people) into all spheres of public life with a particular focus on performance events.

In this course, we will explore various projects that aim to connect people with their surroundings and communities.
We will also explore the strategies that various artists have implemented to increase their audiences and interest in the arts.
We will analyze and design projects that seek sustainability, diversification, and access to the experience of art and culture.

By evaluating environments we could design artistic projects that promote art, artistic education, and the promotion of cultural products as actions to build community, identity, and a creative economy.

In this course, students will gain experience with using simple programmable robots and how they can be utilized in STEM education. The focus of this class will be on learning and designing lessons for K-12 students utilizing these robots. This class is accessible for students at all levels of computer programming experience (including none). 

Introduction to Computer Science 2 continues the design-recipe approach started in Introduction to Computer Science 1. We extend our toolkit from structural recursion into generative recursion, abstraction, and algorithmic problem-solving. Students move beyond simple data definitions to work with more sophisticated structures (trees, graphs, sets, maps) while beginning to reason about program efficiency and resource use.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a political theorist whose work has become increasingly influential in recent years. A student of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, her extensive writings cover such topics as the nature of power, the meaning of the political, and the problem of revolution. This course is a detailed exploration of some of her major works, including The Human Condition, On Revolution, and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, as well as an engagement with some of the critical literature on her work.

This course is an introduction to the theory of knowledge in the analytical tradition. We will engage with topics such as skepticism about the external world, the nature of belief, truth, and justification, as well as foundationalism and coherentism,, internalism versus externalism, along with other topics.

John Rawls (1921-2003) was arguably the most important and influential political philosopher of the twentieth century. His first major work, A Theory of Justice (1971) transformed the field of political philosophy and his ideas and arguments remain at the center of the philosophical debate on the question of justice. This course consists of a careful study of the main arguments in his early and late work as well as a consideration of some of the critical literature.

The Tuning in the Trees is an advanced seminar in microtonality that treats tuning systems as both technical structures and living landscapes. Students will explore how musical intervals emerge from natural patterns—such as tree bifurcations, harmonic ratios, and number sequences—while engaging deeply with Just intonation, Meantone, Bohlen–Pierce, and other non-Western tunings.

Aristocles (known to us as "Plato") lived and wrote in Athens in the 5th c. BCE. More than 2400 years later, Alfred North Whitehead’s famous remark still resonates: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato…the wealth of general ideas scattered through them…have made [Plato’s] writings an inexhaustible mine of suggestion” (Process and Reality, 1929).

This class will investigate various pedagogical approaches to food studies by examining curriculums, topics and discourses being taught at some academic institutions. More importantly, we will put focus on researching art collectives, contemporary civic engagement practices, and other non-institutional models developed by creative practitioners and activists, which engage with food as a conduit to undertake social, political and cultural identity issues and to enhance their community cohesion.