Have you ever learned something really cool, and then had trouble explaining it to someone? Have you ever taken a class and just not understood it no matter how hard you tried? I'm a graduate student who has taught Splash classes for over six years (some of which I've even heard were pretty good!), and I've experienced good and bad classes as both a teacher and a student. I've taught students about analytical biochemistry by making a class about international espionage, improvised a lesson about the history of Boston as a substitute teacher for a class about Ronald Reagan, and once wound up having a Splash class go far better than normal when I was assigned to a room with none of the equipment I had planned to have. In this class, we're going to discuss what I think made these classes good and what made other lesson plans go bad. I also would love to hear about any experiences you all might have had. Then, we'll see how we can use what we've learned to make better presentations, explain your ideas to anyone, and maybe even change the world. This will be a discussion-based class, although I'll be showing some examples from past classes to get the conversation started.

You probably know that the internet is a great place to find all kinds of things like memes, recordings of Tik Toks, the directions to your friend's houses, and recipes for cakes you can make in a mug. But what about the more important stuff? Did you know that, publicly available on the internet, there is the information to figure out why there's that weird abandoned lot in your neighborhood? Or why the cops are racing past your house in the middle of the night? Or, even more surprising, that Border Patrol was using predator drones to spy on protestors in Minneapolis? Crazier still, using only publicly available information on the internet, people just like you and me have tracked down the soldiers involved in shooting down a passenger airliner over Ukraine, and are actively watching human rights abuses by dictators and despots all over the world. This class is about how you can use the internet to find out not only the stuff that everyone knows, but to figure out some things people have long forgotten or really want to stay hidden.

You probably know that the internet is a great place to find all kinds of things like memes, recordings of Tik Toks, the directions to your friend's houses, and recipes for cakes you can make in a mug. But what about the more important stuff? Did you know that, publicly available on the internet, there is the information to figure out why there's that weird abandoned lot in your neighborhood? Or why the cops are racing past your house in the middle of the night? Or, even more surprising, that Border Patrol was using predator drones to spy on protestors in Minneapolis? Crazier still, using only publicly available information on the internet, people just like you and me have tracked down the soldiers involved in shooting down a passenger airliner over Ukraine, and are actively watching human rights abuses by dictators and despots all over the world. This class is about how you can use the internet to find out not only the stuff that everyone knows, but to figure out some things people have long forgotten or really want to stay hidden.

Have you ever wondered how science REALLY gets done? Sure, maybe you've had to tame an ancient Bunsen burner or stared at some petri dishes of some common strain of bacteria in a class in school, but what about the cool stuff? In this crash-course to experimental design class, you get to come up with the questions you want to answer, and I'll try to walk you through the sorts of cutting-edge (and less-than-cutting-edge) methods real scientists would use to try to solve your problem. The experiments designed in class can range from the reasonable to the ridiculous, but the goal is for you to walk away from this class with a better idea of the problem solving that gets done in real labs all around the world. Biochemistry will be what this discussion-based class will focus on, but you can really pick any experiment you want, from curing cancer, to how to produce enough spider silk to sew a sofa. The limit is our collective creativity.