Take away modern navigation tools — a smartphone or even a compass — and getting from point A to B can be tricky. Just ask the 28 students in a course on predictive systems, who were tasked with doing just that in a place many knew intimately: Harvard Yard. The assignment in Alyssa Goodman’s Gen Ed class sounded simple enough, with steps such as “head 211 feet at nine degrees east of south,” but carrying them out was challenging on several levels. “We were supposed to just use our intuition,” said Neil Khurana ’22. “We’re learning about certain navigation techniques that they used before all this modern technology. The point is to try to be navigators ourselves and see if we can acquaint ourselves with an area without these tools just [by] making inferences on where we’re going based off limited information.”