In the 2026-27 school year, dozens of students will delve into the arts of mapmaking, DNA extraction, museum curating and microbial culture. These are among the many activities students can expect to see in Urban’s two new courses — California History and Applied Biology: Biotechnology.

California History will be a non-UAS 11th and 12th grade history elective covering the events and stories that shaped modern California. The course begins with museum visits to learn about the state’s history, with potential visits to the Oakland Museum of California, Presidio Heritage Gallery and David Rumsey Map Center.

“We’re going to visit [multiple] museums … to compare [them] because museums never tell the whole story. They always make choices,” said history teacher Ruthann Betkey, who designed the California History course. “Then, students are going to create their own museum exhibit for our class on a particular part of California history.”

While the required U.S. history classes, Making America and Remaking America, cover important moments in U.S. history, they largely focus on events in the Northeast and the South. “I’m excited for Urban students to get a better understanding of U.S. history that isn’t really concentrated in the East Coast,” said Katie Carroll ’27, a student member of the Program Innovation Committee (PIC), which helps oversee and approve new courses. “I think that’s especially relevant to us because we live with the results of that history every single day.”

The course will culminate in a project where students conduct an interview and create a map integrating their findings from the interview. “It could be a physical map, or it could be a digital map if students want to. [We’re] really asking ourselves, ‘How do we find information, not just in data and not just in sources, but in humans? How do we honor those stories and represent those stories?” Betkey said. 

While California History’s assessments are largely project based, writing is still a core aspect of the curriculum. “If you just assemble a bunch of primary sources and then you say, ‘Done,’ you actually haven’t done the work of explaining why you brought them together. There is writing, but not necessarily just in a standalone five-paragraph essay,” Betkey said.

The second new class is Applied Biology: Biotechnology, a non-UAS 11th and 12th grade science course featuring a variety of hands-on labs that involve gel electrophoresis, ELISAs and more.

 Instead of doing labs with pre-made materials, Biotech students will be involved in nearly every step of the lab-making process. “Whereas a lot of the stuff in biology labs we make for you, I want kids in Biotech to learn how to make those things,” said Mary Murphy, who created the Biotech curriculum. “So you could, for example, [do] gel electrophoresis from start to finish. You figure out the calculations to make the gel, you make the gel, you pour the gel, you prep the DNA, you run the gel.” 

Biotech will be Urban’s first applied biology elective and first biology class in the UrbanX labs. “I think it would be really cool to have bio classes there. … There are lots of physics [classes] there right now, but to have biology [there is] interesting and different,” said Sadie Highland-Jasper ’27, who will be taking Biotech. 

The experience with lab procedures will equip Biotech students with useful skills for college and real-world lab work. “If kids are interested in potentially having some lab skills under their belt, hopefully they can get that from this class,” Murphy said.

Beyond completing lab experiments, students will consider ethical questions of using biotechnology. “When you have the capacity to do these things, should you be doing them? … How far should we push some of these technologies? Who owns them?” Murphy said. “One of the first things we’ll be talking about is [if] you own your own DNA.”

Both Biotech and California History will expand the number of non-UAS course options in their respective departments. “I’m excited that people are gonna get to explore more specialized areas of their interests without it having to be a UAS class.” Carroll said.