The introductory workshop series are compulsory for all those who wish to continue with Inquire. You can learn more about them here. After the workshop series, students can specialize in areas which are of interest to them.
By specialize, we mean that they can choose to work on exploring questions in their areas of interest. They could take workshops/courses in one specialization, or in a subset of them. We encourage students to specialize in multiple areas - as much as their other commitments allow.
Within each specialization, we will have multiple levels of courses. The areas of specialization we plan to offer include:
In this track, you will learn to think like professional mathematicians. You will learn the tools used to solve problems and to construct mathematical theories. The focus will be on creating mathematical knowledge rather than learning mathematical concepts. You will be doing what Euler, Ramanujan, Hardy, Hilbert, Euclid, Turing, and many other mathematicians have done.
In this track, you will learn how to come to conclusions based on data and observations. You will develop a conceptual understanding of statistics and of experiment design. The focus will not be on actually crunching numbers, even though the workshops will involve some of that.
In this track, you will construct scientific theories to explain observations. You will learn how to come up with such theories, evaluate them, and choose among competing theories. You will be following in the tradition of Newton, Einstein, Darwin, and many others.
In this track, you will construct theories to explain ethical judgments. You will learn how to come up with ethical principles, evaluate such theories, and choose between them. This is not an ethics or moral education class - at no point will we be telling students what the right thing to do is. Rather, our goal is to enable them to develop rigorous, consistent theories.
Apart from what you have seen so far, Inquire will be offering workshops/courses which are valuable no matter what you decide to specialise in. They include:
Academic Writing: An introduction to clear, precise, and rigorous writing.
Statistical Thinking: An introduction to statistics, initially without calculation.
Probabilistic Thinking: A conceptual introduction to probability, including Bayesian reasoning.
Reasoning: An introduction to different types of reasoning.
Critical Reading: Critically evaluating claims presented in newspaper and research articles.
Computational Thinking: An introduction to algorithms.
Conceptual Clarification: Building on the introductory series, we will bedeveloping in students the ability to clarify and define concepts across domains.