Games are more than entertainment¿they are tools for understanding complex systems, fostering creativity, and navigating the challenges of strategy, society, and storytelling. This course delves into how games, from ancient pastimes to modern competitions, have evolved to shape collaboration, ignite competition, and sharpen strategic thinking. Through hands-on gaming activities, role-playing simulations, and a semester-long group project, students will uncover how games model real-world systems and equip players to navigate complex challenges in dynamic environments.

In this Connections first-year seminar, you will find your place at Puget Sound and learn important skills for success on campus and in life, all while learning about the French Revolution. Because the French Revolution was multi-faceted, passionate and complex, it provides a useful entryway into exploring the disciplines at the foundation of a liberal arts education. During the semester, each student will put ideas into action as they play the role of a person who really lived during the French Revolution in a community-building and empathy-inspiring student-led academic game.

Nature has come up with exciting solutions to tackle different environmental conditions. This has now influenced a variety of fields such as architecture, technology, visual art and fashion design - spider silk inspired textiles, shell inspired armor or buildings inspired by sponges. This course will provide a broad framework of such design principles in use, and ask students to create their own biologically inspired designs to tackle real world problems.

In this first-year seminar, students explore the written works that predate the ethnographic corpus - the total body of work assembled by anthropologists that seeks to describe the many different and diverse ways of being in this world that humans have configured. Students will commence with the journals and records of the travelers, writers, and thinkers that predated the formation of the discipline of anthropology. In the second portion of the semester, students will begin to read some of the earliest extant anthropological work.

In the cartoon movie Captain Underpants, George and Harold ask Professor P "Why are you trying to get rid of laughter? Isn’t laughter the best medicine?" to which Professor P replies: "Medicine is the best medicine!" This course traces the history and the science of the old adage, "Laughter is the best medicine." In doing so we will examine debates over the role of the mind in health and wellness. Topics include: the history and science of the placebo effect, the "mind-body" relationship, and the relationship between allopathic and non-allopathic medical traditions.

This course is about beginnings. Its main focus is the origin stories in the biblical book of Genesis, which students read through the lenses of history, literature, philosophy, archaeology, religious studies, and theology, and in terms of its reference over the past two centuries in debates concerning faith, science, human flourishing, and social and environmental justice.

This course introduces first-year students to college and to liberal arts education. It takes as its focus the development of basic cursive script reading and writing skills in American cursive, along with broad strategies to engage with unfamiliar texts across various disciplines. Through hands-on practice, students become familiar with forming and reading cursive script letters, words, and documents. Students explore strategies for approaching unfamiliar texts, to enhance confidence and ability to engage with academic materials.

In this 100-level Connections course, first-year students will actively engage with a small group of peers and work closely with the professor and fellow students to transition into college around the theme of games.

CONN155 centers on the social functions of quilting in the U.S. Units on the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the African American quilting community of Gee’s Bend familiarize students with humanistic, artistic, and social scientific ways of knowing, while deepening understanding of quilts’ power to memorialize, to resist, and to inspire. As students study quilting as a subject, they apply their knowledge and ideas to the creation of a community quilt. Each student hand sews two squares, and collaborates on arranging the squares into a quilt top and hand quilting the blanket.

This course investigates the theory and practices of restorative and transformative justice and abolition from multiple disciplines including fiction, legal studies, first person accounts, theory and film. The course begins with an introduction to the principles and practices of RJ and TJ, emphasizing the concepts of harm, healing and repair. To present a context for the rise of the Restorative Justice Movement in the US, the course examines the ways in which the US criminal legal system causes, rather than deters or prevents harm and violence.