Healthy & hAPPy: Outdoor Strategies for Transforming Student Well-Being for Academic Success - This class explores the critical role of student well-being in academic success, focusing on the national decline in mental and physical health among students. We will examine strategies to improve health through active lifestyles in outdoor settings and the benefits of ecotherapy. Practical applications for campus initiatives to foster a healthier student body will also be discussed.

Did an asteroid really kill the dinosaurs? - It is now "common knowledge" that "an asteroid killed the dinosaurs," but what do we actually know about dinosaur extinction and its cause(s)? In this mini-class we will review our understanding of the Cretaceous-Paleogene (KPg) extinction event to reveal what science can and cannot say about the extinction of dinosaurs.

Snooze or Lose - A survey of sleep science, including a look at the circadian rhythm, stages of sleep, and sleep needs throughout the lifespan. Includes an overview of the diagnostic criteria of the most common sleep disorder, insomnia, and recommendations for improving sleep ("sleep hygiene"), a must for any college student.

Spanish Language and Culture, from Tierra del Fuego to Appalachia - Most people in the US know that Spanish is the second most spoken language in the country, but many do not know that Spanish was spoken in the southeast almost 100 years before English, including here in the mountains of NC! In this presentation we'll talk a little bit about this history and explore how Spanish has been and continues to be spoken here for over 500 years! We'll even work on some basic pronunciation and vocabulary. While this is a Spanish “course,” no prior knowledge of Spanish is required for this exercise. Students will learn how to use context clues and prior knowledge of fairytales in English to make meaning out of texts in Spanish. This is how the best learning happens in all of our disciplines, when we take what we already know to ask new questions and solve new problems.

"Why'd they do this and not that?" An Introduction to Behavioral Choice - Understanding how people choose between alternative courses of action is an important component of many fields of people research, and is also practically useful. This class will involve a series of games illustrating Vroom's expectancy theory framework. Through these games we will describe some basic motivational components of voluntary action selection, recognize how this knowledge is useful in our organizational lives, and find increased comfortability with the term "theory".