Hi! Welcome to Introduction to Creativity and Critical Thinking! Our class will alternate between learning about critical thinking and solving fun creative projects together with your classmates. As part of our creativity workshops you may be an engineer working for a toy company who has to design a new toy that can launch objects into specific targets; or, you may be a famous fashion designer who has to make costumes made entirely out of news papers. As a result, you will learn how to approach different design challenges, how to brainstorm about possible solutions, test them and redesign your product. You will get to work on different problems with your teammates and test your ideas together. In the critical thinking part of the class we will get to learn about the structure of arguments, how they are used to convince others of a certain point of view. We will talk about different issues in society and why critical thinking is important to understand them. Time permitting, we might also learn a circle folk dance!

In this class we will learn how different power plants work and how they make energy that we then use in our homes. In class we'll survey several types of energy sources: solar, geothermal, wind, nuclear energy, and energy from fossil fuels. We'll learn the importance of saving energy and why we hear so much about it.