Want to make yeast produce spider silk? How about make clothes out of kombucha? Microbes can do a lot, but through the magic of $\textit{plasmids}$ they can do so much more! As someone who presented at an international conference for my synbio work, I'll go through my engineering process, go over what you need to do this yourself, and take audience requests and see what other cool plasmids we can make!

Monoids are a kind of structure in mathematics which, in a sense, generalize what it means to combine two things together. Many things in our day-to-day lives are monoids: collections of stuff, numbers, functions, colors, and much more. This class will introduce monoids, explore fun examples, and culminate in an important application of monads in computer science: the MapReduce data processing model. Along the way, students should get a taste the possibilities of mathematics beyond rote calculation.