Changing the Curriculum

Next year, Olin is changing the first year curriculum. (Again.)

For the past few years, there have been two semesters of circuits classes. Modeling and Control, or ModCon, is in the fall, and Real World Measurements, or RWM, is in the spring. They're each 3 credits, though 4 credits per class is standard at Olin. RWM in something like its current form was first run in spring 2010, so this is its fifth year. It's also its last.

This week was Course Fair, which means that we all got to see the probable list of fall classes (and a really tentative list of spring classes). There had been rumors going around about changes to the first year curriculum, and the course booklet confirmed them. Next year, the first years will only take a circuits class in the fall, not the spring, and it will be 4 credits. Why the change? Well, RWM has been successful, but a lot of people find ModCon pretty frustrating. It's not really a circuits class; the point isn't to learn how to analyze circuits, and everything in lecture is pretty abstract. The content really is about modeling and control, but a lot of students don't come away with a good understanding of control. What students do learn, though, is how to build a circuit neatly and how to debug. The other issue has been that neither RWM or ModCon has really been a 3 credit class. They took nowhere near 9 hours per week for the average Olin first year. There will be content cut in moving to a single 4 credit class, but the credit count will be more accurate, and maybe mixing ModCon and RWM will result in a course with the right amount of abstraction.

For now, the new class is being listed as "New Combined ModCon/RWM Course," so goodness only knows what anyone will call it. I also know nothing about how it will be structured. Will it have the half-semester RWM team project? How much of each current class will it cover? Where will the topics that are no longer covered in the first year curriculum end up?



One question that was answered, though, is what happens to that slot the first years will have in the spring. Next spring, every first year will take New FBE. FBE is the entrepreneurship foundation, and it's the requirement that has been the least stable over the course of Olin's history. It's called FBE because it was originally Foundations of Business and Entrepreneurship, though at the moment it's officially The Entrepreneurial Initiative. The class has changed drastically many times, and Lawrence, the professor who has run FBE recently, thinks that we're getting closer to the 'right' form of the class. New FBE  will be focused on a group project and be run in studios with 6-8 instructors, some of them people from outside Olin. New FBE will also run in the fall for current juniors and sophomores who haven't taken the class yet.

There are some other exciting changes next year that aren't related to the first year curriculum. The Bio requirement has always been a little problematic; students tended to either not care or be bored. This semester the professors tried some more themed intro bio classes, which seems to have helped a little, but not enough. For next year, any student with a 5 on the AP Bio exam (or a high IB Bio score/other equivalent, I hope) will be allowed to take a higher biology class for the requirement instead of the standard intro class.

There's also another alternative to intro Bio that doesn't involve placing out. A class that has been run successfully for several years now is Stuff of History, which is an 8 credit class, 4 credits of AHS and 4 credits that satisfy the Materials Science requirement. Next fall, Olin is offering something similar for Bio: Six Microbes That Changed the World. It's 4 credits of AHS and 4 credits that count for the Bio requirement. The student body is still trying to figure out what to call the class. The name is a play on the title of another course, Six Books That Changed the World, usually just called Six Books, taught by the history professor, so some people are calling this new class Six Microbes. Other people are calling it Stuff of Bio, though the 'Stuff' bit refers to MatSci, so really it should be Bio of History. In any case, it will be fun to see what happens with this class, especially given how popular Stuff has been.

There's one last change, and it's much smaller. The Robotics classes have new names! They've been Robo 1, Robo 2, and Robo 3. Now they're Fundamentals of Robotics (FunRobo), Integrated Robotic Systems (IntRobo), and Computational Robotics (CompRobo). My UOCD professors would say these are much more descriptive and evocative names, so this is a good, if surface level, change.