Earth and Environmental Sciences - Freshmen

Course # HUSS 1051

Course Description

The course starts by interrogating the very idea of philosophy, exploring various approaches to it and distinguishing it from other disciplines such as science and theology. It discusses the broad global chronology of philosophical thought. The students use Logic to investigate the mode of systematic thinking, and examine Metaphysics and epistemology, two fundamental topics in philosophy. They also explore question of ethics, including meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics during the course. The course helps students to examine centrality of science in modern cultures and the issues it raises as well as the perils and potentials of new technological avenues such as artificial intelligence and the changing mode of human-nature interactions. The course ends by focusing on the question of “What does it mean to be an educated person?”  which will allow students to return to the meaning of reflection and an examined life.

Course Learning Outcomes

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Formulate sound arguments to work out logical fallacies in written and oral texts and discussions;  
• Review various sources of knowledge to engage with the problem of skepticism in their professional and personal contexts;
• Evaluate the relationship of individual with society and state, using concepts of political philosophy in terms of social justice and participation in governance;
• Examine ethical and human implications of increasingly criticized world by exploring its perils and possibilities;

Course Assessments and Grading

Course # HUSS 1203

Course description

This course explores the origin, doctrine, beliefs, and practices of the selected world religions.  Its lessons consist of an introduction to religion and the academic study of religion. Religions are taught by considering their historical and geographical origin. Students study major teachings and devotional practices including views of the absolute, ceremonial rituals, sacred experiences, founding, and sustaining stories. The course seeks to develop and promote an understanding of how global religious traditions reflect the social contexts in which they emerged, and in turn how the traditions affect and transform those societies as well. Throughout the course, students are challenged to think and write with sophistication, intelligence, and critical insight, and analyze primary and secondary sources about major religious traditions. The course has an underlying expectation of helping students to articulate and defend a point of view or thesis on matters of significance or controversy. Scientific study of the religion prompts students to question the various aspects of doctrines, and beliefs, and at the same time appreciate the plurality of meaning and interpretations that believing community attach to their religion.

Learning Outcomes

Students will demonstrate an understanding of the subject matter of, and various methods used in, the scientific, academic study of religion by:

• Describing the nature and diversity of world religions from a historical perspective.
• Assessing various theories, concepts, and materials (e.g., written texts, oral reports, archaeological data) central to the academic study of religion.
• Describing how world religions form in their geographic, social, and historical contexts.

Assessment Schedule and Weights

Course # ECON 2012

Course Description

Information Technology is an introductory informatics course, which covers basic programming methods and tools used by researchers in arts to manipulate, manage and analyze relevant data in statistics. The focus of the course will be on the R programming language, which students will use to solve problem-sets in statistical analysis using real statistical data. Basic statistical functions like summary() and describe(), data visualization, and data manipulation techniques are introduced. This course analyses generic programming language concepts and techniques, and demonstrate their implementation in statistical analysis using R. The most relevant functions in data science, such as indexing, conditional statements, loops, customized functions, algorithm design, descriptive statistics, linear regression, decision tree, random forest, t-tests etc. are explained. The main goal of this course is to give students an understanding of the breadth of different programming applications. Students learn how to design and write effective code using R to perform routine and specialized data manipulation, management, analysis, and statistics tasks. The tasks will be accomplished by identifying and using existing R, R-Markdown packages as well as appropriate open-source software extensions.

Course Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this course, every student will be able to:

• Explain the theoretical concepts of different datatypes
• Conceptualize and create loops and if/else statements in R
• Create customized functions in R to handle results
• Manipulate data for descriptive statistical analysis in R
• Use R to perform mathematic calculations
• Use special packages, such as ggplot2, R -Markdown, plotly, to convert graphs and convert plain text to formatted text
• Use MS Excel for summarizing data, creating graphs & charts
• Using the packages dplyr, tidyr, shiny, randomForest, caret, e1071 and xgboost for various statistical analysis, data manipulation, graphing and creating machine learning algorithms. 

Course Assignments and Grading

Course # DMNS 1006

Course Description

Calculus is a foundational course at UCA. This introductory calculus course covers differentiation and integration of functions with applications. The course is designed in a way that provides students with a thorough grounding in concepts and applications, analytical techniques, and numerical methods of Calculus.

In this course, students will study mathematics that deals with the precise definition of a limit, compute limits graphically and algebraically, infinite limits and limits at infinity, continuity and one sided limits, basic differentiation rules and rates of change, Implicit differentiation, applications of derivative, computing indefinite integrals, the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus,  techniques of integration, applications of integrals, logarithmic differentiation, inverse functions and derivatives of inverse functions, exponential functions, using exponential and logarithmic functions to model compound interest, exponential growth and decay,  functions of several variables and their applications.

Course Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students should be able to:

• Compute limits and derivatives of algebraic, trigonometric, and piece-wise defined functions
• Compute definite and indefinite integrals of algebraic and trigonometric functions using formulas and substitution
• Use the derivative of a function to determine the properties of the graph of the function and use the graph of a function to estimate its derivative
• Estimate a propagated error using a differential
• Solve problems in a range of mathematical applications using the derivative or the integral
• Determine the continuity and differentiability of a function at a point and on a set
• Determine whether a function has an inverse function. Find the derivative of an inverse function.
• Use exponential and logarithmic functions to model compound interest, exponential growth and exponential decay
• Solve optimization problems involving functions of several variables
• Use appropriate modern technology to explore calculus concepts

Course Assessments and Grading

Course # EAES 1013

Course Description

Chemistry 1 introduces the fundamentals of chemical bonding, properties of matter, solution-phase chemistry, thermochemistry, equilibrium, kinetics, and nuclear chemistry. Chemistry at the microscopic and macroscopic level are explored with emphasis on an Earth and environmental context, including atmospheric chemistry, aqueous chemistry, and solid-state structure. Applications of chemistry in the modern world and its impact on humans and the environment will be explored throughout the course.

Course learning outcomes

At the end of this course the students should be able to:

• Discuss how chemistry makes powerful contributions to understanding and managing the Earth, environment, and human society.
• Describe the basic chemical principles.
• Apply equations to quantitatively describe aqueous systems, systems at equilibrium, ideal gases, and the thermochemistry of a system.
• Predict molecular structure based on a chemical formula and write chemical equations that describe simple reactions in aqueous solution.
• Practice virtual laboratory work (online experimental procedures)

Course Assessments and Grading

Course # HUSS 1117E

TBA

Course # HUSS 1035

TBA

Course # HUSS 1036

TBA

Course # HUSS 1037

TBA