Have you ever wondered what makes dye so brightly colored? The color comes from an interesting property of transition metal compounds. Come learn the science behind colors! This course will teach you the basics of atomic and molecular orbitals, transition metal complexes, d orbital splitting, and ligand field theory. Yeah science!

Have you ever wondered how an MRI works? Well, the secret is in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, a powerful tool used to identify the structure of molecules. We will learn everything there is to know about this imaging technique -- and have some fun doing it!

Have you ever heard of sudoku? Well, there are TONS of different types of logic puzzles out there that can be really fun. This course will teach you about sudoku, kakuro, and griddlers, and will also show you some basic tricks for solving these puzzles. At the end, there will be a competition (for a prize!) to see who can solve the fastest!

Scientists and engineers (and a whole host of other people) rely on estimation to guide their work. We rely on them to determine if experiments are safe to conduct, or if they're worthwhile to conduct. More importantly, we use them to ground ourselves in reality. We use them to get a feel for what numbers actually mean. What does it mean for 1 kg of TNT to release 10^6 J? How can we imagine things huge numbers like 10^23 in the context of atoms? Or even 10^20 gallons of water. How do you visualize that? It turns out that doing order of magnitude estimates helps you do precisely that. In this class, we're going to answer some (hopefully all) of the following questions (just using basic facts about the world and common sense!): - How many jelly beans are in a jar full of jelly beans? (Of arbitrary size, but we'll check it for some specific sizes just in case someone ever asks you to guess how many jelly beans are in their jar) - How long would it take someone to walk across the Earth along any given circle of latitude? - How many atoms fit on the head of a pin? - How long would it take you to count to a million? How many students would it require to reshelve 2,000,000 library books in three weeks? How are these problems related? - How many cells are in your body? How much water do they hold in total? - How long is your DNA? - How much hydrogen gets converted to helium in the Sun each year? - How many air molecules from my breath are you inhaling every second? - What is the energy output of a nuclear bomb? (This is a fairly historic problem solved by Fermi) - How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop? (another classic). And we will experimentally verify this... free candy!!!! We will also answer some of your curiosities. If you have a question, we can estimate the answers together. In the process of answering these questions, we will also call on our scientific instinct to the best of our ability to determine if these answers are reasonable. In other words, we're going to do science the way scientists do it.