JulianB1
Well-Known Member
A little bit of background here:
My university recently restructured its Honors program, and part of that restructuring was the creation of many open course slots for "special topics honors classes". The idea behind these is that they will be courses the honors students can use to fulfill general education requirements, while being novel, off-beat, or unique. They also must be general enough to not have any specific prerequisites beyond standard high-school level courses. A general call was put out to the faculty to submit ideas and proposals for these courses, to start next fall. So I was lamenting to the Honors director that I was having a hard time thinking of something related to mathematics that could be interesting and taught with few to no prerequisites, and he suggested that myself and my friend Travis (a biologist and also a craft beer fan) design a course on "the math and science of brewing beer" or something along those lines. I was pretty surprised that not only was such a course idea being received favorably (I don't think I would have had the temerity to suggest it myself), but actually being suggested and encouraged to me by the program director. So suffice to say I want to run with this idea. The plan would be Travis and I would co-teach it; I'd handle the math and physics aspects while he would take more of the biology and chemistry (with plenty of overlap).
Okay, so such a course might actually happen; the big question now is how to design it so that it's interesting, has a sufficient level of rigor to be worth college credit (even as a general education requirement). I'd love to get the opinions of others on a variety of aspects related to this, but especially with regards to suggestions for topics. Take the following into consideration:
1. The topics should possess some non-trivial scientific or mathematical content.
2. Where possible, the topics should focus on core aspects of brewing beer rather than tiny minutia (that being said, a lot of the more scientifically intricate parts involve tiny minutia, so there will be that too).
3. This isn't designed to be a course on learning to homebrew, although many things may be explained with an eye to that type of setup due to the ease in setting up demonstrations.
I've got plenty of ideas already and I'll certainly share those, but I'm interested in hearing from this community.
My university recently restructured its Honors program, and part of that restructuring was the creation of many open course slots for "special topics honors classes". The idea behind these is that they will be courses the honors students can use to fulfill general education requirements, while being novel, off-beat, or unique. They also must be general enough to not have any specific prerequisites beyond standard high-school level courses. A general call was put out to the faculty to submit ideas and proposals for these courses, to start next fall. So I was lamenting to the Honors director that I was having a hard time thinking of something related to mathematics that could be interesting and taught with few to no prerequisites, and he suggested that myself and my friend Travis (a biologist and also a craft beer fan) design a course on "the math and science of brewing beer" or something along those lines. I was pretty surprised that not only was such a course idea being received favorably (I don't think I would have had the temerity to suggest it myself), but actually being suggested and encouraged to me by the program director. So suffice to say I want to run with this idea. The plan would be Travis and I would co-teach it; I'd handle the math and physics aspects while he would take more of the biology and chemistry (with plenty of overlap).
Okay, so such a course might actually happen; the big question now is how to design it so that it's interesting, has a sufficient level of rigor to be worth college credit (even as a general education requirement). I'd love to get the opinions of others on a variety of aspects related to this, but especially with regards to suggestions for topics. Take the following into consideration:
1. The topics should possess some non-trivial scientific or mathematical content.
2. Where possible, the topics should focus on core aspects of brewing beer rather than tiny minutia (that being said, a lot of the more scientifically intricate parts involve tiny minutia, so there will be that too).
3. This isn't designed to be a course on learning to homebrew, although many things may be explained with an eye to that type of setup due to the ease in setting up demonstrations.
I've got plenty of ideas already and I'll certainly share those, but I'm interested in hearing from this community.