Models, Systems and AI in STEM

Catalog description

This 3-credit hybrid course, intended for non-science majors, includes 200 minutes of weekly meetings and fulfills the Pathways Life and Physical Sciences requirement. It introduces students to the practices of modeling, systems thinking and machine learning (Artificial Intelligence) in the context of the STEM disciplines. Models are simplifications of more complex systems that are used to test predictions, refine explanations, and show how parts that make up systems interact. Students will use physical and digital models to investigate the causes of the seasons, the motion of the planets and stars, do hands-on, lab-based investigations involving turbulence in liquids, balance and stability of structures, gas diffusion, emergent behaviors of flocks of birds in flight, and the spread of epidemics. Students will train, without doing computer programming, simple Neural Networks to recognize patterns, and watch them learn in order to demystify AI. Students will become critical users of Generative AI, and create a multimedia presentation on how a system of interest in nature or the built world works.