What are the elements of a great puzzle or a great adventure? In this game design class, we will discuss the history of treasure hunts, create and playtest our own treasure hunts, and analyze the business elements of modern treasure hunts. The course will culminate in a campus-wide treasure hunt collaboratively designed by the students in this class. The hunt will be held on Earth Day (April 22) and will reinforce the themes of Earth Day, including sustainability and environmental protection.

Systems exist in every facet of life. Biological systems, political systems, economic systems - they all exhibit properties that, scholars in education argue, we need to understand in order to solve our most pressing environmental and ecojustice problems. In this course, students will grapple with real-world "wicked problems" while they learn about systems theory and systems thinking. How do systems of oppression intersect with disruptions of climate systems? Why do economic systems fail to capture ecosystem services?

In this class we will introduce the central concepts in Statistics by running and analyzing data from Cognitive Science experiments. Statistics topics covered in the class include summary statistics, graphical methods, and resampling and parametric inference methods for calculating confidence intervals and conducting hypothesis tests. Students will learn how to use the R programming language to explore statistical concepts and to analyze real data. Assignments will consist of weekly problem sets and a final class project.

Every society offers public rituals, formal instruction and places of sacred memory whose purpose is to foster a common political identity like citizenship and nationalism. Some of these devices appear natural and timeless; others are obviously invented. Some exist in peaceful periods; others are meant to galvanize people for organized action and warfare. This course, whose focus is the contemporary US, introduces their analysis. Students will lead the discussion of readings, write a couple of brief essays and present a final project.

The goal of social psychology is to understand and explain how our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. At the heart of social psychology is the recognition that our responses are greatly influenced by social situations and are not simply the product of our individual personalities. This course will provide you with an overview of research and theory in social psychology.

Millions of people worldwide have been inspired to pursue science by shows written and hosted by Carl Sagan, David Attenborough, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, and others. What makes their videos appealing? How do they communicate complex scientific ideas in a simple language? In this course, students will learn how to develop ideas for a science video, write a script, and host a science-themed show for online audiences. The students are expected to work in small groups for their projects.

This course will begin with an introduction to Discourse Coherence Theory, which appeals to David Hume's psychological principles to explain why a given text is interpreted as being (in)coherent. This theory will allow us to establish an evaluation metric for translation: one translation is better than another translation if it better preserves the psychological principles used to interpret the original text. We will explore this hypothesis via case studies of several texts which are written in languages other than English and are ambiguous.

This course provides an introduction to computer programming, with a thematic focus on the implementation of evolutionary processes in computers. The first part of the course will cover basic, general purpose programming concepts using the Python programming language. In the second part of the course, students will work on programming projects at the intersection of computer science and evolutionary biology, involving topics such as genetic algorithms and artificial life. No prior experience with computer programming or evolutionary biology is required.

This course will introduce students to the production of animated short films with the tools and techniques of three-dimensional (3D) computer graphics. Readings and lectures will cover the theoretical foundations of the field, and the homework assignments will provide hands-on, project-based experience with production. The topics covered will include modeling (the building of 3D objects), shading (assignment of surface reflectance properties), animation (moving the objects over time), and lighting (placing and setting the properties of virtual light sources).

The purpose of this course is to introduce you to human cognition or the scientific study of the mind. We will take an information processing view of psychological functions. Thus we will spend much of our time discussing information, in the form of mental representations, and how this information is transformed in the mind.