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History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8

Goals, Resources and Opportunity Costs

Every financial decision starts with limited resources and competing goals. Through fictional teenagers' choices, learners distinguish needs from wants, write SMART goals and calculate the saving needed to reach them, measure opportunity costs in money and time, think at the margin, and learn to ignore sunk costs. The elective uses fictional people and numbers and never gives personal financial advice.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 110 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8

Income, Work and Taxes in Fictional Cases

How does work turn into income, and income into take-home pay? With fictional workers, learners compare hourly, salary and other pay, calculate overtime under the federal rule, convert salaries to hourly rates, trace gross pay to net pay through payroll taxes and a fictional withholding table, apply a fictional progressive tax table (marginal versus average rates), and weigh career choices using human capital and total compensation. No real tax filing advice is given.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 115 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8

Budgets, Cash Flow and Tradeoffs

A budget is a plan for money before it is spent. Using fictional young adults, learners build a monthly budget from net income, separate fixed from variable expenses, follow cash flow through the month to catch shortfalls, plan for irregular income and emergencies, test one common rule of thumb (50/30/20) and its limits, and adjust a budget when circumstances change.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 115 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8

Saving, Compounding and Inflation

Why does starting early matter, and why can money sitting still lose value? Learners calculate simple interest (I = Prt) and compound growth (A = P(1 + r/n)^nt), estimate doubling time with the rule of 72, compare short and long time horizons, measure inflation's effect on purchasing power, approximate real returns, and learn how deposit insurance protects bank and credit union deposits. All accounts and rates are fictional, and no products are recommended.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 120 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8

Borrowing, Interest and Credit Concepts

Borrowing lets people buy now and pay later, at a price. With fictional loans and cards, learners calculate interest and total cost, see why paying only a small fixed amount on a credit card can take years, follow how loan payments split between interest and principal, compare offers by APR and total cost, learn the factor categories behind credit reports and scores, and recognize red flags of high-cost and predatory lending. No lenders or products are recommended.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 125 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8

Consumer Decisions and Fraud Awareness

Smart buying and staying safe from scams. Learners compare unit prices, recognize marketing tactics designed to speed up spending, calculate the yearly cost of subscriptions, read key contract terms, and learn the common patterns of scams (phishing, impostors, advance-fee and prize scams) and their red flags: pressure, secrecy and unusual payment methods. They practise a safe response: stop, verify through official channels, tell a trusted adult, and report.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 120 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8

Risk, Insurance and Diversification Concepts

Life involves risks: accidents, illness, lost property and investments that fall in value. Learners calculate expected loss, compare strategies for managing risk (avoid, reduce, keep, transfer), see how insurance pools risk, work out costs under a fictional health plan (premium, deductible, copay, coinsurance and out-of-pocket maximum), and explore why diversification and time horizon matter when investing. Everything is fictional and conceptual; no insurance or investment advice is given.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 125 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8

A Financial Decision-Making Project

The elective's capstone. Learners work through a fictional household's year: Carmen and her brother Luis share an apartment and must balance their budget, build an emergency fund, decide how to finance a used car, and choose between two health plans. They calculate each piece, state their assumptions, weigh trade-offs, and write a recommendation memo that presents options fairly. Everything is fictional; nothing is personal financial advice.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 150 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 10

Questions about the Modern World

Learners open the study of the modern world (about 1450 to the present) with three big tools: arguing about when 'modern' begins, judging historical significance with explicit criteria, and reading distinctly modern sources such as statistics, photographs and propaganda. They practice shifting between local, regional and global scales and write an argument about the significance of a modern development.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 115 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 10

Global Exchange and Its Consequences

Between 1450 and 1750, ocean routes linked every inhabited continent. Learners analyze the demographic and ecological effects of the Columbian Exchange, use data to study the scale and organization of the Atlantic slave trade and its effects in Africa, follow American silver to China, and examine the joint-stock companies and mercantilist policies that organized this first global economy, before judging who gained and who lost.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 125 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 10

States, Rights and Political Revolutions

Learners compare the 'age of revolutions' (about 1688–1826) across Britain, North America, France, Haiti and Spanish America. They connect Enlightenment ideas to political change, classify structural, ideological and immediate causes, closely read declarations of rights and the people they left out, and judge how far each revolution achieved its own stated goals.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 130 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 10

Industrialization, Labor and Social Change

Learners evaluate competing explanations for why industrialization began in Britain, analyze how factories, railways and cities transformed work, families and environments, compare the responses of liberals, socialists, unions and reformers using short public-domain texts, and trace industrialization's spread to Germany, the United States and Meiji Japan and its global effects.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 130 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 10

Empire, Resistance and Nationalism

In the 1800s industrial powers built vast empires in Africa and Asia. Learners analyze the motives, technologies and racist ideologies behind the 'New Imperialism', trace conquest from the Opium Wars to the Berlin Conference, study the many forms of resistance and adaptation (from Adwa to the Meiji state), and evaluate nationalism as both a liberating and an exclusionary force.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 130 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 10

Global Conflict and Its Aftermaths

Learners analyze the long and short causes of World War I and the nature of total war, evaluate the peace settlements and the interwar crises (revolution in Russia, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and Nazism) using primary sources and election data, study the global scope of World War II and the Holocaust with care, and examine the institutions built afterward to prevent another catastrophe.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 135 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 10

Decolonization and Contemporary Connections

Between 1945 and the 1990s, most colonized peoples won independence. Learners analyze why empires ended, compare negotiated, nonviolent and armed paths to independence (India, Ghana, Vietnam, Algeria, Kenya), examine Cold War pressures, non-alignment and the end of apartheid, and evaluate decolonization's lasting legacies in borders, economies, migration and institutions.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 130 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 10

A Comparative Modern History Investigation

In this capstone, learners design and carry out a comparison of two modern cases from different regions (for example, Britain and Meiji Japan's industrialization, or India's and Algeria's paths to independence). They choose cases deliberately, build a comparison matrix, use quantitative evidence responsibly, write a comparative causal thesis that accounts for counterexamples, and produce a cited investigation.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 140 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

US History through Questions and Evidence

Learners open the year of US history by practicing the core moves of historical thinking on one big question: how did American attitudes toward foreign alliances and world power change from Washington to NATO? They source documents with the HIPP method, trace continuity and change over time, debate turning points and periodization, and write an evidence-based argument.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 120 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

Scientific Questions about Behavior

Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes. Learners see how it became a science, turn everyday questions into testable ones, write hypotheses with operational definitions, distinguish theories from hypotheses and falsifiable from unfalsifiable claims, recognize how intuition and hindsight bias mislead us, and explain one behavior (teenagers' late sleep timing) at biological, psychological and social-cultural levels. The elective is about research literacy, not diagnosis or therapy.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 115 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

Indigenous Peoples, Colonization and Exchange

Learners begin US history long before 1607, with the diverse societies of Native North America. They compare Spanish, French, Dutch and English colonial projects, analyze encounters through Indigenous diplomacy, alliances and resistance (from the Powhatan Confederacy to the Pueblo Revolt and Metacom's War), and trace how English colonies moved from indentured servitude to hereditary, race-based slavery.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 125 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

Research Methods and Ethics

How do psychologists gather trustworthy evidence, and how do they protect the people they study? Learners compare case studies, naturalistic observation and surveys (including sampling), interpret correlations without assuming causation, design experiments with independent and dependent variables, random assignment, control groups, placebos and double-blind procedures, and judge validity and reliability. They then study research ethics: informed consent, protection from harm, confidentiality, deception and debriefing, ethics review boards, the Belmont Report's principles, and the historical cases that made these rules necessary.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 140 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

Revolution, Constitutions and Political Debate

Learners analyze the imperial crisis that turned British subjects into revolutionaries, the hard choices the war forced on Patriots, Loyalists, enslaved people and Native nations, the great debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists over the Constitution, and the bitter conflict between Hamilton and Jefferson that produced the first political parties and, in 1800, a peaceful transfer of power.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 130 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

Biological Foundations and Limits of Models

How does the brain produce behavior, and how do we know? Learners trace how neurons communicate (action potentials and neurotransmitters), map the nervous system and major brain structures, and examine the evidence behind brain claims: famous case studies (Phineas Gage and Henry Molaison) and how retellings changed them, EEG and fMRI and their limits (including the multiple-comparisons problem), plasticity, and heritability as a population statistic. Throughout, they ask how all models simplify. No medical or clinical content is included.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 135 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

Sensation, Perception and Cognition

Our senses collect information, but our brains construct what we experience and think. Learners study transduction, thresholds and Weber's law; bottom-up and top-down processing, grouping principles and illusions; selective attention, inattentional blindness and change blindness; and the mental shortcuts (availability, anchoring, representativeness) and confirmation bias that shape judgment. They connect classic studies to everyday reasoning and to evaluating evidence.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 135 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

Expansion, Slavery and Sectional Conflict

Learners analyze how cotton and the market revolution bound North and South together while expanding slavery, examine Manifest Destiny and the Mexican–American War from US and Mexican perspectives, trace how the question of slavery in the territories destroyed political compromise between 1846 and 1860, and evaluate the causes of secession using the words of participants.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 130 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

Civil War, Emancipation and Reconstruction

Learners trace how a war to preserve the Union became a war that destroyed slavery, through the actions of enslaved people, soldiers, Congress and Lincoln. They read Lincoln's own words on the war's meaning, analyze the political struggles, achievements and violent overthrow of Reconstruction, and compare how historians from the Dunning School to W. E. B. Du Bois and later scholars have interpreted the era.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 135 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

Learning and Memory

How do we learn from experience, and why do memories fade or change? Learners analyze classical conditioning (Pavlov), operant conditioning (reinforcement, punishment and schedules), and observational learning (Bandura), then study memory as encoding, storage and retrieval: working memory, the forgetting curve (Ebbinghaus), the testing effect and spacing (Roediger and Karpicke), and the reconstructive nature of memory shown by Loftus and Palmer's 'smashed' versus 'hit' study. Examples are everyday and nonclinical.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 140 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions
Free starter

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

Industry, Migration and Reform

From the 1870s to 1920, conflict among corporations, workers and farmers reshaped American politics. Learners analyze the Gilded Age economy and its battles, the 'new immigration' and nativist backlash, the Populist challenge and the Progressive reforms that expanded the federal government's role, and the struggle for women's suffrage, while evaluating who gained from reform and who was left out.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 130 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

Development and Social Context

How do people develop, and how do other people shape what we do? Learners compare Piaget's stage theory and its critiques with Vygotsky's social view of learning, examine attachment research (Harlow's monkey studies and their ethics, Ainsworth's Strange Situation) and Erikson's psychosocial stages, then study social influence: Asch's conformity experiments, variations of Milgram's obedience studies, and the bystander effect, including how the story of Kitty Genovese was later corrected. They close by asking how culture and 'WEIRD' samples limit what psychology knows. The course describes research; it does not classify learners.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 140 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

Evaluate Psychological Claims

Psychology attracts popular myths and eye-catching headlines. Learners test common claims (the '10% of the brain' myth, matching teaching to 'learning styles', 'left-brained' and 'right-brained' personalities) against evidence, study the replication crisis and the reforms it prompted (preregistration, larger samples, open data), calculate and interpret effect sizes, and build a checklist for judging media reports of psychological studies.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 135 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

The United States in Global Conflicts

Learners analyze key US decisions for war from 1917 to 1964, the recurring tension between national security and civil liberties (from the Espionage Act to Japanese American incarceration and McCarthyism), how historians have argued about the atomic bomb and the origins of the Cold War, and competing explanations for why the Cold War ended.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 135 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

A Nonclinical Research-Literacy Project

The psychology elective's capstone. Learners design (but do not run) a study on a harmless, nonclinical question, write a hypothesis with operational definitions, choose an experimental design, complete an ethics review checklist, analyze a provided fictional dataset (means, difference and effect size), identify limits, and write a plain-language summary. The model question asks whether a short end-of-class quiz improves vocabulary recall compared with rereading. No mental-health topics and no questionnaires about learners are involved.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 155 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

Rights Movements and Social Change

Learners analyze how the Black freedom struggle combined a long legal campaign with mass direct action and voter registration to win the landmark laws of 1964 and 1965, examine the strategic debates within the movement, and trace how women, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, people with disabilities and LGBTQ Americans adapted its strategies. The focus is on historical strategies, institutions and evidence, not on present-day policy positions.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 135 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

Economy, Technology and Institutions

Learners examine how economic crises and new technologies reshaped American institutions: competing explanations of the Great Depression, the New Deal and its critics, postwar federal programs and research that built the highway, suburban and computer age, deindustrialization and the 2008 financial crisis. They read economic data closely and compare how institutions responded to crises eighty years apart.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 140 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

Contemporary Historical Questions

How can historians write about events that are still within living memory? Learners examine why sources for the recent past emerge slowly, how memory differs from history, how oral historians gather testimony ethically, and how born-digital sources change research. They apply these methods to the end of the Cold War, the September 11 attacks and their aftermath, and the digital revolution, analyzing evidence and perspectives without taking sides on current policy debates.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 130 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

Compare Primary and Secondary Sources

Historians argue with one another, and their interpretations change. Learners study historiography through two classic American debates, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis and Charles Beard's economic interpretation of the Constitution, and the historians who challenged them. They learn to dissect a secondary argument (thesis, evidence, citations, scope), evaluate how well evidence supports a claim, and compare two interpretations of the same event.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 135 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions

History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11

An Independent US History Investigation

The capstone of Grade 11. Learners design and carry out an independent investigation of a US history question: they write a proposal, search archives and digitized collections using period vocabulary, build an annotated bibliography, position a thesis among historians' interpretations, outline with counterarguments, and write a cited investigation that acknowledges its limits. A worked model on the Chicago Defender and the Great Migration shows each stage.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 160 min
  • Quiz: 9 questions