New Curriculum Kite and Key
Information on this page applies to students beginning as first-years in Fall 2027 and beyond.
Kite and Key are a pair of innovative new courses for the first year in the College, designed to develop analytical skills and concepts that are foundational for subsequent study in the humanities and natural and social sciences.
Through lectures, seminars, and small-group labs, these courses emphasize navigating through competing claims and observations via careful reasoning and productive dialogue.
Across Kite and Key, students engage with exciting themes in history, logic, music, artificial intelligence, anthropology, coding, religion, probability, race and gender, legal studies, data science and much more.
Kite
How can we think about questions at the heart of human experience such as how we should live, who we are obligated to, and why people suffer? What gets to count as knowledge or art, and how can we understand complex transformations of people and groups over time? This course introduces students to some ways that the humanities and qualitative social sciences investigate the past and present of humanity—as well as how we might meet the twists and turns of the future. Through analysis of texts, images, music, objects, and film, Kite touches on areas of inquiry that range across the globe, while honing critical thinking, writing, and speaking skills.
Assigned readings for Kite currently include the following, in whole or in excerpt:
- Plato, The Republic, Book VII, “Allegory of the Cave"
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1845-1846)
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
- Marilyn Frye, “Oppression”
- Saidiya Hartman, “Wayward: A Short Entry on the Possible”
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
- Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument"
- Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto"
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
- Patrick Brinkley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
- Nomi Stone, Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire
- Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
- Doris Kearns Goodwin, Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir
“This course allowed me to find intersections between topics I once regarded as inherently different. It confirmed for me that my various passions may find natural connections, and there is always more to explore. My knowledge is expanding, evolving, and valuable.”
“I really enjoyed the fact that everyone in my seminar became really close, including my peers and I, my professor, and my TA. It allowed me to hear different perspectives than my own and to make new friends. Moreover, it really helped me notice things about the world and my understanding of my goals in the world and at Penn.”
“What I really learned to do over the course of the semester was how to read. A lot of the time, I used to read all of the words of a text, but not really sit with it and think. Many of the texts we read in Kite challenged me to stop and think during my reading process.”
Key
How do we collect, analyze, and interpret data to make sense of the world? Is there a limit to our capacity to understand the physical universe? This course teaches students key concepts and skills important for making evidence-based statements and detecting flawed arguments in the natural sciences and quantitative social sciences. Using probability, statistics, and causal reasoning, with help from hands-on programming, students in Key learn to evaluate the roles of different kinds of evidence, intuition, reason, hypothesis, and interpretation, and examine various uses of quantitative data in the world today.
Key addresses topics including:
- Why and how we do science
- Scientific method
- Logic
- Programming in Python
- Artificial intelligence
- Concepts of probability and statistics
- Hypothesis testing
- Correlation and causality
- Confounders
- Regression
- Scientific misconduct
- Limitations of science
“The introduction to simple code language and some statistic formulas definitely will play a role in my future studies so it was nice being introduced to it so early on in my academic learning.”
“Great intro class to coding and data science making me want to minor in cs.”
“The course helped reinforce my conceptual and qualitative understanding of data, which will certainly prove useful as a student majoring in political science.”
Kite and Key in the News
Kite and Key Faculty Share their views
Featured in a recent College Voices podcast episode, professors Kevin Platt and Masao Sako, who developed the Kite and Key courses as part of the "College Foundations" program, share their experience in joining the conversation with other university members in the evolution and future of liberal arts education at Penn.