National University of Singapore

This is an interdisciplinary course that explores the principles of communication in Design and Engineering. Students learn how they can draw on visual and verbal resources to clearly articulate the valued knowledge in their disciplines to both specialist and non-specialist audiences. Students study a range of narratives around multimodal artifacts such as posters, renderings, drawings, models and exhibits from these disciplines and become familiar with the ways to engage, inform, critique and persuade different audiences and communicate their designs effectively.

This course covers how a project manager leads the project team. Major topics include theories of leadership; traits of project leaders; and leadership competencies such as visioning, strategizing, team building, decision-making, empowering, influencing, planning, and communicating.

This course covers American historical and cultural developments from European colonization to the end of the 20th century. It studies both the internal developments in the United States and its growing importance in international politics. It offers a range of social, economic, and political perspectives on the American experience and develops students' understanding of the dominance of the United States in contemporary world history and culture. 

The course introduces computational thinking as applied to problems in science, with special emphasis on their implementation with Python/Python Notebook. A selection of examples illustrate (a) fundamentals of algorithm design in computer programming (b) solution interpretation, as well as (c) analysis of the computational solutions and data visualization using state-of-the-art tools in Python. These cover different types of approaches typically used in scientific computational thinking, including deterministic, probabilistic and approximation methods. The course highlights scientific computational issues such as accuracy and convergence of numerical results.

This course explores topics at the intersection of philosophy of mind and language, such as whether thought depends on talk or vice versa, whether we think in words or images, whether those words are words of English or a sui generis mental language just for thinking, whether animals which can't talk can think and whether the mind is like a computer. These questions are central to contemporary philosophy and language and are also an important case study in the relationship between the methods of analysis, experiment and introspection in philosophical psychology. The course requires students to take prerequisites.

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to introduce how complex biological phenomena can emerge from simple rules. Through interactive lectures, guided reading and hands-on tutorials and simulations, students learn to appreciate how basic concepts like feedback and robustness generate biodiversity across multiples scales. The course requires a prerequisite of General Biology. 

This course examines the modern Japanese sense of cultural, social and national identity, as analyzed by social scientists, cultural historians, and scholars of Japanese thought. Topics include famous studies of the Japanese self by psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists and socio-linguists, supplemented by a historical perspective focusing on the samurai heritage and the ideas behind the Meiji Restoration. Japanese language is not required.

This course covers the key concepts of the different modes of heat transfer (conduction, convection and radiation) and principles of heat exchangers. It develops proficiency in applying these heat transfer concepts and principles, to analyze and solve practical engineering problems involving heat transfer processes. Topics include introduction to heat transfer; steady state heat conduction; transient heat conduction; lumped capacitance; introduction to convective heat transfer; external forced convection; internal forced convection; natural/free convection; blackbody radiation and radiative properties; radiative exchange between surfaces; introduction to heat exchangers and basic calculation of overall heat transfer coefficient. The course requires students to take prerequisites.

This course provides an overview of the theories and perspectives applicable to the study of communication and new media. Students apply various theories from both critical/cultural and social scientific approaches to analyze diverse digital phenomena and controversies. Students gain a foundational knowledge in how digital technologies affect interactions, how social media changes news consumption, how the conception of work changes in an era of crowdsourcing, and how media content can be made more persuasive.

This project-based course focuses on developing products to meet users’ latent needs. The course combines problem framing, problem solving, and product development. Students learn about the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework, distinction between values and features, and product vision. Students develop tangible prototypes that work and test them with users. Topics include product presentation using analogy, metaphor, and product storytelling. Students work in teams in a studio environment and gain hands-on experience in product development.