School of Science

Conducting Robots is research-based, multidisciplinary course taught by four faculty members from Computer Science, Interactive Multimedia, Mechanical Engineering, and Music. The course allows students from each discipline to construct artificial systems capable of conducting an orchestra and visualizing feedback. In essence, the students create a robotic “maestro” that mimics the arm movements and facial expressions of a human conductor at work. The course was originally created with the support of a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Among the famous House-isms, as the pearls of cynical wisdom from the mouth of Dr. Gregory House, M.D., have come to be known, is the reoccurring assertion that, everybody lies.” Here at TCNJ, it is no lie though that first-year students have the opportunity to watch the popular television drama and learn about the science and medicine depicted in the series but also to engage discussion on its broader sociological themes.

Charles Darwin’s voyage to the Galapagos Islands inspired the masterpiece of scientific thinking known as the theory of evolution by natural selection. Every biology student learns about it in the classroom but few have the opportunity to follow in Darwin’s footsteps and explore the islands firsthand. Yet come May, a group of students enrolled in The Natural History of the Galapagos Islandsand Ecuador will be doing just that.

People and Places in the East African Rift is an interdisciplinary course taught by a physicist and a historian. The course is organized around one fundamental question: what is the relationship between physical landscapes and the human societies that inhabit them? The main goals are for students to understand how unique geological and environmental features came to exist, to analyze how these features affected the various human societies that came to inhabit the regions, and how these landscape features and different societies both evolved through time.