Victoria University of Wellington

This course covers advanced topics in areas such as sensation, perception, attention, consciousness, memory, language, and decision making. It focuses on behavioral and neuroscience methods and findings, and critically examines theories that account for key empirical results.

This course introduces the basic principles of game design, animation, and motion design. It covers fundamental game design concepts such as mechanics and loops, enabling participants to conceptualize and develop playable games. In addition to game design, the course introduces core motion principles, visual design for motion, storyboarding, sequential imagery, and graphic animation.

This course focuses on political parties and major policy debates in New Zealand. Topics include the ideologies and action principles of major parties, shifts in inequality and the welfare state, state funding of political parties, relations between central and local government, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and environmental policy.

This course examines Indigenous, Māori ways of understanding, doing, and creating history. It also examines how Māori historical frameworks engage with the legal and political processes of the Waitangi Tribunal. 

This course examines how cognitive and behavioral neuroscience can be applied in clinical settings. It examines the ways in which neurological illness can affect functions such as attention, memory, speech, decision making and emotion regulation. It covers the principles underlying neuropsychological assessment, and the problems that are typically observed following specific illnesses such as stroke, traumatic brain injury and dementia. It also explores how neuroscience can provide insights into problems that present in the psychology clinic, such as depression, anxiety, addiction and schizophrenia.  

This course teaches how to design ethically and culturally responsive psychological experiments in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand. It covers the analysis of data collected using common experimental designs and the reporting of results according to the conventions of scientific writing.

This course examines migration to New Zealand from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales between 1800 and 1945, situating it within the broader context of British and Irish migration and New Zealand’s role in the Age of Mass Migration. It covers factors in Britain and Ireland that encouraged emigration, conditions in New Zealand that attracted immigrants, and the migration and settler experiences of specific groups.

This course covers foundational topics in cognitive science from the perspectives of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, and computation. Topics may include how minds are defined, how they represent the world, how they communicate, and how they support adaptive behavior.

This course introduces narrative and storytelling in the context of visual design. It draws on a range of traditional and contemporary examples, including Māori storytelling practices, and examples from film, animation, digital and physical games, and comics. 

This course offers an in-depth exploration of cultural diversity in Oceania by analyzing the complex interplay among colonial encounters, postcolonial impacts, Indigenous epistemologies, and identity formation. It approaches these themes through the lens of the ocean, which has historically shaped connections, migration, trade, and cultural exchange across the region. Through theoretical discussions, case studies, ethnographic readings, and multimedia materials, the course examines how various colonial histories have influenced Indigenous societies and their ways of knowing, being, and relating.