Your new friend at CTY teaches you a dice game. If you roll a 4, you win and the game ends. If your friend rolls a 5, they win and the game ends. You take turns rolling until one person wins. If you roll first, what is the probability you will win? This course explores probability and statistics, two areas of mathematics that easily transfer from the classroom to the real world. You and your classmates will conduct experiments and learn to make graphs, charts, and tables to display data.

Strengthen your analytical and problem-solving skills and become a stronger competitor in this challenging course that’s designed for students with minimal math competition experience at the middle school level. Through lessons, sample problems, videos, and mini-competitions, we’ll build on ideas introduced in Middle School Competitive Mathematics I, developing your skills in logic, algebra, geometry, number theory, and probability.

Did you know the idea for the microwave all started with a candy bar? Inventor Percy Spencer was standing in front of a magnetron when he noticed his chocolate treat was melting in his pocket. When Spencer held a bag of corn kernels next to the magnetron and they started popping, he knew he was on to something. This course will teach you about inventors like Spencer, their creations, and their impacts on our world. If you’re the kind of kid who likes to take things apart to figure out how they work, this is the class for you.

Calling all inventors! CTY’s Inventions in Engineering course introduces young students to the imaginations, habits, and characteristics of successful inventors, and the history and impact of their creations. From Rube Goldberg machines to upcycled cars, you’ll use the engineering design process to solve problems while creating your own inventions. You and your classmates will work on a hands-on project in addition to writing peer reviews, keeping an idea log, and participating in forums and live class meetings to share your ideas and reflect on your designs.

What draws audiences into the settings of their favorite fantasy worlds? What makes these otherwise mythical places feel like real locations in readers’ minds? In this course, we’ll use applications of geography, cartography, and anthropology to create and develop our own fantasy worlds. We’ll learn the literary elements of storytelling, analyzing specific examples from the genre as we engage in writing exercises that give you the tools to compose stories in your newly minted fictional setting.

Get a taste of the publishing world by working with your classmates to create, edit, and publish Lexophilia, CTY’s student literary magazine! Building on the skills you learned in Master Class I: Writing, Editing, and Publishing, you will further develop your craft by creating, revising, polishing, and submitting your own original writing. We’ll cover advanced writing techniques that real writers use to prepare their pieces for publication or for inclusion in an author’s portfolio.

From Covid-19 to HIV to malaria, infectious diseases remain one of the world’s leading causes of death. How do scientists compile and use statistics to combat outbreaks? In this course, you and your classmates will investigate the science and politics of disease, from the roles epidemiologists play in unlocking pandemics’ points of origin to exploring how policymakers address AIDS and the avian flu. You’ll gain insight into the cause and spread of global diseases, the role of scientists in identifying, controlling, and/or preventing them, and the political and ethical implications.

Spatial understanding is necessary for interpreting, understanding, and appreciating our inherently geometric world. Many everyday tasks such as designing a treehouse, solving a jigsaw puzzle, or laying out a garden require spatial reasoning abilities. This course will help you develop those abilities through discussions and hands-on investigations. You’ll explore mathematical relationships such as congruence, symmetry, and reflection; learn geometric formulas to calculate area, surface area, perimeter, circumference, and volume; and explain your findings using geometric terminology.

Put your thinking cap on to begin studying concepts in forensic science, starting with historical perspectives covering the use of forensics to investigate and solve crimes. You’ll go over history and development, crime-scene evaluation, the crime lab itself, trace evidence, impressions, fingerprints, blood, and DNA as you interact with online lessons, conduct hands-on lab activities, communicate with classmates in online forums, write a research report, and much more.

This course explores conundrums and analyzes a range of mathematical and philosophical paradoxes. You’ll consider Zeno’s paradoxes of space and time, such as The Racecourse, in which Achilles continually travels half of the remaining distance and seemingly can never reach the finish line. To address these types of paradoxes, you’ll be introduced to the concepts of infinite series and limits, and then explore paradoxes of set theory, self-reference, and truth, and paradoxes of probability and inductive reasoning.