Spring Online Weekends were a success!

May 2021

We’d like to thank everyone for two great Online Weekends this spring. Although we could not be together in person, this was a wonderful opportunity to spend some time together (when it was still light outside!) to work together on group activities that don’t fit neatly into a one-hour slot. You know what happened during your online experience -- here are a few examples of experiences in other courses.

Jason Lineberger’s Honors Ecocriticism class had a stellar time partnering with the Nasher Museum of Art to discuss a Kent Monkman painting in an hour-long slow art tour. Their discussion included paintings referenced by Monkman as well as issues around colonialism in art, the American frontier, landscape painting, and the role of nature for Native American artists.

Things took off in Dr. Garrett Love’s Aerospace Engineering course as teams of students focused on team design with the “Delta Design Project” -- a scenario involving the design of a living space for the inhabitants of the fictional two-dimensional realm of “Delta-P”. Each student was assigned a role -- architect, project manager, structural engineer or thermal engineer -- and negotiated with their team to find a design that optimized multiple competing constraints. Each role used their own interface to calculate design variables pertinent to their own objectives and each team presented their final design for critique by their peers.

Led by instructor Mark Dubois, students in Western Political Thought examined ancient and contemporary sources pertaining to the transformation of revenge and personal vendettas into judicial systems overseen by the state, while students in Chad Keister’s AP Microeconomics course engaged in a design sprint wherein they constructed a new profit-maximizing firm from scratch, creating a firm (called Buyethical) around an application that connected ethically-minded consumers to businesses that are independent, local, and serious about sustainability.

Students in Melanie Shivraj’s Honors Epidemiology spent the day examining the process of outbreak investigation and the epi triangle. Students picked an epidemic and studied and analyzed it using the epi triangle. They also got to chat with an epidemiologist in the field about her career paths and her current research.

Thank you to our faculty, Online Resource Coordinators, and all of those who attended for making these weekends happen. We value our time together and look forward to next year’s opportunities. Which one will you choose?