Undergraduate Courses

This class acquaints the student with the fundamentals of Design by focusing primarily on layout, composition and color through use of the grid. The grid is a fundamental building block for publication design (print and digital), website design, and animation design. This class focuses primarily on Graphic Design but proposes basic concepts that can be extrapolated into other design fields. Classes will be client and solutions-based and will assume a professional career orientation. Additionally the class will provide a current overview of what’s happening in the contemporary design world through field trips, readings and presentations.

A continuing exploration of graphic design to help students refine their skills and develop more personally expressive ways to solving problems through visual communication. Assignments, readings, and research projects will allow students to consider the complex nature of graphic design. Both traditional and digital approaches to typography and layout will be incorporated with a wide range of assignment. A priority is placed on the use of concepts to dictate design techniques and on the pursuit of a genuinely creative vision.

Explores the subject of desire in modern media and culture. Freud's ideas have had a profound influence on everything from the earliest manuals on public relations to the struggles of modern feminism. We will read a range of psychoanalytic theorists while studying how their insights have been put to work by both the culture industry and its critics.

Exposes students to approaches to research in diverse settings in the field of Applied Psychology. Students begin developing ideas for independent research. Through scaffolded experiences, lectures, discussions, guest speakers, research lab visits, and readings, students develop and articulate goals for engaging in independent research, identify types of mentorship and ways to integrate their own goals for research with the work of a potential mentor, and begin to formulate ideas for their research proposals.

A comprehensive overview of human development from conception through adolescence. Theories of developmental psychology are related to research findings, and implications are drawn for practical issues.

Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent - satisfies the requirement for Society and Social Sciences

Discussion of human growth across the lifespan; multiple contexts in which development unfolds are explored and implications for practice are considered.

Assessment of the food intake and needs of individuals of diverse ages and backgrounds. Taking into consideration the genetic, cultural, social, and economic factors that affect dietary choices, students will develop dietary plans that meet current recommendations for a variety of health conditions using exchange systems, food composition data, menus, recipes, and product labels.

Production-based course designed as a structured classroom environment for hands-on, critical inquiry. Students receive research guidance, feedback and support for individually-designed and executed digital media/computational projects. May be taken in conjunction with another MCC course or as a stand-alone course in which students develop an independent project that may be an outgrowth of a previous MCC course. Open to graduate students by permission of instructor.

The aesthetic and personal potential of the computer for the artist is defined. Students work on building skills in areas such as PhotoShop, Illustrator, layout and design, and animation. Readings and discussion include the impact of digital technology on culture, as well as individual artists’ projects.

Assignments, critiques and demonstrations for the more advanced digital art student. The use of the computer to augment and expand conceptualization and expression has provided the artist with some of the most important new means for visual thinking since the Renaissance invention of perspective. Students learn how to use the computer as an extension of the visualization process and its specific applications in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional art.

An introduction to Digital Electronics, including binary systems and logic. Students must enroll in a Lab section to apply hands-on experience in simple computer programming techniques, digital processing applied to music with specific relevance to computer music synthesis and MIDI.

Hands-on lab accompanying Digital Electronics. Lab sessions will contain hands-on experience with logic circuits and microcontrollers. The course culminates with a student developed final project.

This course offers students a foundational understanding of the technological building blocks that make up digital media and culture, and of the ways they come together to shape myriad facets of life. Students will acquire a working knowledge of the key concepts behind coding, and survey the contours of digital media architecture, familiarizing themselves with algorithms, databases, hardware, and similar key components. These technological frameworks will be examined as the basic grammar of digital media and related to theories of identity, privacy, policy, and other pertinent themes.

Students may pursue work in black and white, color or digital photography. Technical demonstrations may include studio lighting, experimental processes, and large format cameras. Individual and group critiques focus on the development of ideas and meaning through photographic imagery, as well as aesthetic and formal concerns. Readings on individual photographers, history, and theory, as well as darkroom techniques are assigned.

A hands-on introduction to the technical and creative uses of digital photography. The class will explore the use of digital technologies to compose, shoot, scan, alter, and print images, as well as considering the ways in which photographic meaning has been changed by the use of the computer. Students provide their own camera and paper.

Digital recording technology and production techniques are explained and demonstrated. Lecture topics engage analog to digital conversion, digital to analog conversion, digital signal theory and filter design, digital audio effects and mixing. Studio lab assignments are performed outside of class reinforcing weekly lecture topics.

Elements of play scripts are analyzed and dramatized. Students cast and rehearse members of of the acting classes in brief scenes performed at workshop meetings on Friday afternoons. Class assignments included.

Explores the implications and meaning of having a disability in global contexts by introducing students to experts’ voices, especially disabled activists, as they seek to advance disability justice and inclusion and demand systemic change in spheres of influence including education, politics, healthcare, the arts, culture, social welfare, and everyday life. Examines how public (government) and private (outside of the government) policies and practices in these sectors affect the inclusion of persons with disabilities. Students explore and identify how international trends in disability and inclusion, local cultural beliefs, and biases influence inclusion.

In this course, we will examine the significance of technology to the definition and experience of disability; the relationship between disability and the development of new media; the politics of representation; and current debates between the fields of disability studies and media studies. Specific topics will include: biomedical technology and the establishment of norms; the category of “assistive technology”; cyborgs and prostheses as fact and as metaphor; inclusive architecture and design; visual rhetorics of disability in film and photography; staring and other practices of looking; medical and counter-medical performance; media advocacy, tactical media, and direct action.

Not Available.