Upper School Intersession 2025

I will give advice on improvement in chess: how to practice and how to choose out of the sea of content and players online to learn from. After this discussion we will apply the ideas with games and review in class.

Prerequisite: Familiarity with all rules of chess including checkmate, castling, and en passant. Familiarity with chess notation is helpful.

We will cover the history of AI in chess from the first simple algorithms to the best modern engines, covering both their progress in chess and the meaning for AI as a whole.

Students will have the chance to develop their own simple chess AI, and will be given guides on how to develop more elaborate ones.

This class will cover each piece individually: cases where it is strong, cases where it is weak, and how to make your own pieces powerful and your opponent's pieces weak.

Prerequisite: Familiarity with all rules of chess including checkmate, castling, and en passant. Familiarity with chess notation is helpful.

In this session you'll learn how to design in-person storytelling games (including tabletop roleplaying games and larp). We'll play a few short games together and talk about processes and principles for game design. Then you'll design your own games and playtest them.

No prior play or design experience required.

How many ways can you make $0.97 from quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies?
How can you derive a closed-form formula for the sum of the first n squares or cubes? Or for the n-th Fibonacci number?

These all sound like inherently discrete counting problems--yet there are ideas from the realm of continuous functions, which have an essentially non-discrete, infinite character, that can be used to solve them. We'll explore generating functions, which encode solutions in polynomials, and touch on finite calculus, which extends ideas of calculus to the discrete realm.

Prerequisites: most of the class will just use ideas through precalculus, but familiarity with basic derivatives and integrals will be helpful for the last part of the class.

This class will cover the basic fundamentals of the game of Go and hopefully start you on a path towards learning a strategy game that's captivated millions of minds around the world for thousands of years. Students who already know how to play are welcome to join and will be paired up with other experienced players.

Go (also known as Weiqi, Baduk and Igo) is an ancient Chinese strategy board game that has been around for at least 2000 years. It's often considered the oldest strategy game on the planet that's still being played in its original form (although Chess has also existed for thousands of years, the rules have changed over time).

Once upon a time, it was considered one of the four essential arts of a Chinese scholar and although it's not very well known in the Western world, it is still widely played in China, Japan and Korea today, with major tournaments often being broadcast on the news and online.

Go players often joke that you can learn the game in a few minutes but it may take you the rest of your life to master. Come to this class if you like deep strategy games and puzzles! I'd love to help you start on your Go journey!

Students who attend this session are invited to the open Go play sessions.

Now that you know some of the basics of Go playing, this is your chance to practice and play with an instructor available to advise you.

This session is open to students who attend the introduction "Learn to Play" class or anyone who knows the basics of how to play.

Why were grown men once absolutely terrified to ride trains? What would compel well-to-do women to swear off all physical activity and eat nothing but heavy cream soups? Why were doctors so worried about wristwatches? How did Coca-Cola – with traces of cocaine – become America’s favorite headache remedy?

In a word: anxiety. 

In this session, we’ll explore the history of modern America through its wild, amusing, and sometimes disturbing responses to big changes that included the rise of cities, new technologies, lightning-fast transportation, access to drugs, and shifting gender roles and identities. To do this we'll examine medical literature, fairytales, Victorian fiction, and a bit of 19th century pseudoscience.

For students interested in history, medical mysteries, gender studies, source analysis, and storytelling.

The witch’s hat, towers and turrets, gingerbread latticework, and the attic. In the Victorian era, houses with these architectural details represented all the comforts associated with the American Dream. But by the 20th century, ornate Victorian homes began to warn us: something’s not right in there; something nefarious is lurking inside.

Why?

In this session, we’ll take a ghost tour through the cultural history of Victorian architecture in America. With a little help from the Brothers Grimm, Shirley Jackson, Tim Burton, Alfred Hitchcock, and Sarah Winchester, we’ll explore what made these structures so iconically creepy.