Great Problems Seminar

The Great Problems Seminar (GPS) is a two-term course that immerses first-year students into university-level research and introduces them to the project-based curriculum at WPI. The course gives students and faculty the opportunity to step outside their disciplines to solve problems focused on themes of global importance, culminating in annual Poster Presentation Days that celebrate students’ innovative research on a wide range of solutions to some of the world’s most critical challenges.

Ten Years of the Great Problems Seminar

Business Officer magazine features WPI’s distinctive project-based learning curriculum and the impact of the program on student engagement in addressing human needs and social challenges.

[“Teaching Students to Care” originally appeared in the November 2017 issue of Business Officer, the monthly flagship magazine published by the National Association of College and University Business Officers in Washington, D.C.]

Read the Story

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From the very beginning, WPI students are engaged with current events, societal problems, and human needs as they delve into issues of global importance in their first project experience. As one student explains, the Great Problems Seminar helps students understand the problem first—from food sustainability to water conservation to sanitation solutions—and “find the humanitarian way to fix it and implement it in a community...".

Finding Humanitarian Solutions to Real-World Problems

Extinction: Who Will Survive?

Throughout most of Earth’s history, fossil evidence shows that five mass extinction catastrophes have occurred; scientists estimate that we’re witnesses to the sixth. This class will examine scientific debates about past and present causes of extinction and the consequences of species loss.

Heal the World

Starting with the biology of an infectious disease and moving on to the management of disease control, students will study the costs of research and regulation that are required to bring new drugs to market while learning to examine problems with local complexity and global scale.

Humanitarian Engineering: Past & Present

This course is designed as a role-playing game where students take an engineering adventure back to 19^th-century Worcester and create a solution to treat the heavily polluted Blackstone River to prevent the spread of disease. Students will also propose a solution to an engineering challenge faced by a developing country today.

Designing Progress: Living on the Edge

When volunteers design and build a school in Nicaragua, do they help the community? When you plan a tree on Earth Day, does it make a difference? In this course, students will consider social, economic, political, and environmental factors to investigate design concepts concerning form, materials, structure, and systems.

Food Sustainability

How can we, and how should we feed the world? In this hands-on course, students will work in teams with the support of faculty members to research and develop technological, chemical, biological, policy-driven, and other types of solutions to help answer these questions in cases around the world.

Ignorance is Not Bliss: Can Schools and Technology Help?

Should where you grow up and go to school determine how well you do in life? Students will study educational systems around the world and explore how factors like nature and nurture, opportunity and outcome, and the availability of education technology affect a person’s life.

Power the World

Every community faces energy problems, and their solutions involve both positive and negative consequences. This course investigates the depth and breadth of energy production, transmission, and use, and explores the technical, social, economic, and environmental effects and challenges of power generation from both fossil fuels and renewable energy.

The World's Water

With a changing climate and growing global population, the availability and sustainability of fresh, clean water is in question. In this course, students will work in teams to identify a specific water problem and research and develop solutions that are technological, policy-driven, or ecological in nature.

Livable Cities

Students will examine how the interaction of urban ecology, globalization and labor markets, social and environmental justice, city design and planning, and gentrification come together to create contemporary urban life. Students will focus on one problem of urban living and research and present sustainable solutions to this problem.

GPS Award Winners

GPS Projects Database

First Year Experience

Grand Challenges Scholars Program