Wandering through the many awesome dimensions of astronomy/cosmology, physics, chemistry, geology, biology, mathematics, and computer science is an act of exploring. Students are young and generally want to explore. We keep this in mind in designing the storyboards so that as much as possible, each module is an “exploration” of an information domain.
For example, one might think that mathematics would be nothing that students would want to explore. But remember that ISGE presents math in different ways than the classical math GE course. It does not drill students to do one of the very many types of math problems such that they can solve the problems on tests. It helps them appreciate math. So we explore “dimensionality” through fascinating figures and concepts like those of Abbott’s Flatland. We produced animations showing how cubes passing through two dimensional space appear to two dimensional beings (as shown below). We have found students completely fascinated and focused on such things as trying to really see hypercubes in our 3D world and imagine what they really are. We have explorations of fuzzy set theory and its consequences and true world impacts. We present the students with a taxonomy to explore of many different types of non-linear causality and the consequences of each.