This course offers plant identification and natural history, emphasizing native and introduced trees and wildflowers. On- and off-campus field trips.

Video games are not only fun to play but interesting and challenging to program, involving elements that are useful in programming other sorts of systems as well. They incorporate graphics, audio, and animation, must model relatively complex systems, and often have relatively strict requirements on timing. In this course, we explore techniques behind game implementation by implementing some of our own. This course is programming (and gaming) intensive.

This course provides an introduction to natural language processing, the discipline of enabling computers to process and understand human language. We will learn fundamental techniques for automated text and speech analysis and understanding, with insights from linguistics. Students will get hands-on practice implementing computational algorithms, reading scholarly research articles and will design and carry out an independent final project.

Evolution is central to our understanding of Biology; it helps us explain both the diversity and commonality in organismal form, function and behavior that have been generated over 3 billion years of life on Earth. We will discuss the mechanisms of evolution within populations and between species, examine some branches of the tree of life and learn how the tree is generated, discuss how phenotypes arise from genotypes and interactions with the environment, and how development is central to understanding evolution.

An introduction to painting, sculpture, and architecture in Europe and America from the Renaissance to the present. Classes are organized around five focused topics: Renaissance Florence; the artist in the seventeenth century; art and revolution; nineteenth-century realism and abstraction. Lectures will be complimented by class discussion.