English

This course offers insight into space, both the physical and developmental sides. It discusses robot needs in space and the historical and technological evolution of space robotics. This course examines teleoperation versus autonomy, as well as teleoperation systems and technology. After covering the main applications of robots in space (rovers, manipulators), it covers two practical examples: 1) an autonomous control application and 2) a teleoperated control application. Finally, this course looks at future applications of space robotics. 

This course examines how to interpret data involving uncertainty and variability; how to model and analyze the relationships within business data; and how to make correct inferences from the data (and recognize incorrect inferences). It will include instruction in the use of software tools (primarily spreadsheets) to analyze and present quantitative data.

From the 1790s to the 1840s, a Berlin-based network of artists and intellectuals developed novel ways of writing, thinking, feeling, and living under the conceptual banner of the ‘romantic.’ Drawing on key texts by Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Novalis, Henriette Herz, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Bettina and Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the brothers Grimm, the class explores the central areas and practices of their romantic discourse of radical aesthetic, philosophical, political, and sociocultural modernity. Students critically examine how the romantics manifested and confronted the defining conflicts of their political and cultural present as these crystallized in Berlin, the capital of Prussia, 19th century Germany’s emerging hegemonic power. The course also surveys influential contemporary critiques of the romantic movement (Goethe, Hegel, Heine) and follow its legacies in the 20th century. Art history is another focus of the class, which includes a museum visit.

This course introduces key concepts in analog and digital electronics. Topics include linear networks and filters, operational amplifiers, simple transistor circuits, logic gates, microcontrollers, and digital applications.

This course examines alternative sport and games young people play in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally. It explores a range of non-traditional and non-competitive physical activities. It reflects on the socio-cultural dimensions of these types of physical activities, including an examination of how alternative sport enables young people to learn, play, communicate, create, express themselves, and belong.

This course presents opportunities to learn and practice the basic skills of presentation and negotiation through case studies and role play.

This course introduces students to U.S. military history and covers the long history from the colonial era up to World War II. Themes the course discusses include: What is military history and what approaches are there to writing military history? Who and what are the subjects of military history? How have the US armed forces evolved in time and how have they shaped the course of events in US history? Why has the US waged wars and how have wars reflected back on US society, popular culture, and the military itself? What happens if one looks at the military through the lenses of race, class, and gender?

This interdisciplinary seminar examines Berlin as a crucible of revolutionary thought and action across two transformative centuries. Rather than simply surveying historical events, the course investigates how revolutionary ideas—about the state, freedom, justice, and human emancipation—have evolved, collided, and been reimagined from the Napoleonic era through contemporary social movements. Students engage with canonical texts in philosophy and political theory (Hegel, Marx, Luxemburg, the Frankfurt School) alongside historical analysis and on-site exploration of Berlin's revolutionary landscapes—from the Berlin Wall Memorial to former Stasi prisons to sites of student uprising. Throughout, the course emphasizes critical connections between past and present, examining how Berlin's revolutionary traditions inform contemporary debates about surveillance, resistance, urban space, and democratic participation. Students develop skills in comparative historical analysis, philosophical argumentation, and critical citizenship, learning to recognize how understanding revolutionary history can illuminate present-day struggles for social transformation.

This course is an intensive introduction to the art of screen acting. Students will experiment with ‘intention’ through prescribed and self-selected scenes and develop skills in embodying character and working with physical and emotional fluency. Practical insight into dealing with the pressure of the camera’s gaze and learning to work objectively with one’s self image is given. Exercises will focus on the analysis of classic scenes from theater, film and television.

This course offers an intensive reading experience and lively seminar discussions about Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1929 and is the best-known big-city novel in the German language, a work of literary modernism frequently compared with James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer (1925). Students explore its literary, cultural, and political content and how the narrative technique of the novel, groundbreaking in its time, is fast-paced and experimental and montage-passages capture a cacophony of urban voices and disembodied discourses (politics, popular culture, advertising) of the so-called Golden Twenties.