Learn how digital artists animate the mouth of a Toy Story character by manipulating a single point on a polygon, or how combinations are applied to turn three unique robot designs into 3,000 individual robots for background characters in Wall-E. How many helium-filled balloons does it take to fly? What do combinatorics, geometric modeling, and trigonometry have in common? All are mathematical questions answered every day by animators at Pixar Studios.

From microscopic investigation to the basics of veterinary medicine, this course explores the principles of comparative animal anatomy, physiology, and genetics. You will learn key concepts of zoology such as characteristics of the animal cell, heredity, taxonomy, and evolution, including natural selection. Through laboratory dissections of animals ranging from perch to rats, you’ll explore the different systems of each species—digestive, nervous, immune, endocrine, reproductive, and circulatory.

The first transistor, created at Bell Laboratories in 1947, was about 4 centimeters in size. Today, millions of transistors fit on a single computer processor chip—about the size of a postage stamp. Innovations like these are hallmarks of the exciting and challenging field of electrical engineering. This course explores foundational concepts, starting with electromagnetism. You’ll map the electric field lines generated by an electric charge and investigate current, voltage, resistance, energy, and magnetism.

Master the basics of geography and the cartography of Africa, Asia, and Oceania to connect natural earth features with historical human experiences in these regions. Acting as historians, you and your classmates will investigate transformative world events, individuals, developments, and processes from the Neolithic era to the present.

You’ll develop strong study habits, close-reading skills, and expertise in evidence-based writing in addition to learning how to contextualize information, make comparisons, and identify cause-and-effect relationships.

Bring your experiences to life on the page in this personal essay course. Through 10 assignments, we’ll experiment with different essay formats to describe scenes, illustrate conflicts, narrate events, share memories, and extract meaning for yourself and your readers. As you progress through the course, you will use your senses to create vivid descriptions, observe and choose details that convey your perspective to readers, imagine experiences and describe events from other points of view, and deconstruct essays and use them to create new works of writing.

Analyze historic material, synthesize your own ideas, and develop skills to make conclusions on the basis of an informed understanding of history in this course that successfully prepares you for the AP U.S. History exam. You’ll master the ability to interpret documents while learning how to persuasively present your reasoning and evidence in an essay format.

What do your T-shirt, water bottle, and DNA have in common? They’re all made of chemical units called monomers, which combine to form polymers. To make the world a better place, scientists regularly modify and improve polymers—that’s how we have things like non-stick pans, raincoats, and toothbrushes.

Develop strategies for solving a wide variety of word problems using resources from Ken Johnson and Ted Herr’s Problem Solving Strategies: Crossing the River with Dogs and Other Mathematical Adventures. Explore diagrams, systematic lists, elimination, working backwards, matrix logic, and unit analysis as you strengthen your ability to use these strategies to solve a wide variety of complex problems.

What are the key indicators of an economy’s performance? How do governments craft policies that promote economic growth? What does it mean for a country to have a trade deficit? Analyzing economies at an aggregate level, macroeconomics explores questions such as these, providing a bird’s-eye view of economic activity. This course surveys fundamental concepts in macroeconomics, including money, banking, inflation, employment, national income, economic growth, financial markets, and the role of public policy.

Become an investigator and search for clues within each story, then try to solve the puzzle! In this course, you and your classmates/fellow detectives will journey to 19th century London with Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, solve puzzles with a young savant, and join a ragtag group of students on a quest to preserve the history of the Harlem Renaissance, all while reading stories of danger, fantasy, and suspense.