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. As part of The Global School at WPI, the course gives students and faculty the opportunity to step outside their disciplines to solve problems focused on themes of global importance. This culminates 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.

Tackling the World's Problems

These first-year students tackled the issue of divided cities—and their analysis won the Undergraduate Humanities Diversity Award at the Humanities Education and Research Association Conference for the "best undergraduate conference paper that addresses race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality."

GPS Learning Outcomes

TEAM WORK: Collaborate effectively on a team
RESEARCH: Find varied, credible sources, assess their claims and relevance, and use them appropriately
WRITING: Produce clear, effective, evidence-based writing
PRESENTING: Prepare and confidently deliver engaging and effective presentations
APPROACH TO PROBLEMS: When working on complex, open-ended problems, be able to identify answerable questions, and select and evaluate appropriate solutions through the application of multiple perspectives.
CULTURAL AWARENESS: Understand and articulate the differences in experiences of the “great problem” for different people.
VALUES: Describe your values and those of others as they relate to addressing the great problem.

Extinction: Who Will Survive?

Throughout most of Earth’s history, species disappeared at an average rate of 1 to 5 per year, and fossil evidence shows that five mass extinction catastrophes have occurred. Scientists estimate that we are witnessing the sixth mass extinction. Where are extinctions currently having the greatest impact? How might conservation efforts prevent them? This Great Problems Seminar examines debates about past and present causes of extinction, the factors that contribute to vulnerability or resiliency of endangered species, and the consequences of species loss, including the links with pathogenic outbreaks such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recover, Reuse, Recycle

n this course, students focus on material resources and reusing them—recycling. It blends engineering with humanities and builds a framework for the world in which students will live, showing them how they can make the world different through their ingenuity and innovation. Policy and societal issues are also discussed in the context of the recovery and recycling. Students collaborate with the NSF Center for Resource Recovery and Recycling (CR3) and work on projects sponsored by leading global corporations.

Shelter the World

How do you provide shelter for over 7 billion people, almost half of whom live on less than $5.50 a day? With rising slum populations, increasing natural disasters, and overflowing refugee camps, how do we address the growing demands for safe living spaces?  What do we need to understand as designers, engineers, or aid workers to provide shelter for the world? Working in teams in this design studio, we will learn design concepts, the Design-Build process, materials, and structure to address this housing challenge. We will create a model that is affordable, safe, and appropriate for our selected population.

Seeking Sustainability

If the moment we are living in has revealed anything, it is that our contemporary modes of life are deeply unsustainable. The world’s ecosystems and social systems are vulnerable to a number of accelerating threats. The recent global pandemic has added to this. In this class we will look at these problems from a number of perspectives and try to understand what a transition to a more sustainable mode of existence might entail.

Ignorance is Not Bliss

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.

Climate Change

Global climate change is here, from sea level rise, to stronger storms, and more dangerous wildfire seasons – just to name a few impacts. We will examine the causes and consequences of climate change on the environment and people, incorporating a local to global approach. This course will place a special emphasis on valuing differential impacts on vulnerable people and habitats.

Livable Cities

What are the possibilities and liabilities of human life in the urban environment? This course will examine the ways in which 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 develop an area of expertise in one problem of urban living and research, present, and propose sustainable solutions.

Humanitarian Engineering

This course explores the concepts of development, technology, and water access in a remote region of southwest Morocco, where indigenous people have historically been denied access to basic human rights, including water and sanitation. To both study and address the problem, this course will explore the culturally appropriate and technologically advanced methods of harvesting water from fog used by the largest fog water harvesting system in the world.