The students who came back
The course
Pizza and a Slice of Future (FIS 394) was a one-credit ASU course built on an unusual premise, stated in its own syllabus: “This is not a conventional course!” — grounded in the idea that transformative learning happens “when you are so engaged in a topic or conversation that you forget about class” (Fall 2025 syllabus). Students met weekly over pizza, in a room designed to look like a lounge, to talk about what it will mean to be human a hundred years from now. Conversation was the learning mechanism: attendance and engagement carried 70% of the grade, and the community norms were the initiative’s five guiding principles, quoted verbatim in the syllabus (Fall 2025 syllabus; taught since 2023 per Maynard CV, with the meetup dating to at least December 2022 per futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu).
Some sessions mixed undergraduates with residents of an ASU-affiliated retirement community — intergenerational conversations about self-driving cars, airships, and why people travel — a format the initiative’s federal foresight report describes as testbed, community outreach, and amplifier in one (Future Travel Foresight Catalyst final report, §3, 2025, rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/91942). The course drew university coverage: “The future is at hand — with a slice of pizza in the other” (ASU News, June 20, 2023).
What happened
Students came back after their enrollment ended. Not for credit — they weren’t seeking any — but to keep being part of the conversation: some “kept returning to Pizza and a Slice of Future without seeking any course credit” (andrewmaynard.net llms.txt, captured 2026-08-05).
This sits inside a wider pattern Andrew describes from his teaching and mentorship across the initiative’s courses: impact on students that changes the way they think in ways no assessment captures — apparent only when you talk with them, hear back from them later, and have them tell you that the course and the mentorship were transformative (Andrew Maynard, 2026).
We state the significance plainly, because it is easy to underweight: this is what unmeasurable student impact looks like. A student returning to a class they are not enrolled in is a data point no gradebook records. It is also close to the strongest evidence a course can generate — revealed preference, freely given. Our teaching philosophy anticipates exactly this: some learning is deliberately left unassessed because assessment would deform it, and the danger is letting “metrics of learning take the place of actual learning” (see Philosophy).
Status and gaps
- Established fact: the course design, its principles, its intergenerational sessions, and its media coverage are documented (syllabus, 2025; DOT report, 2025; ASU News, 2023).
- Documented fact: the returning students are documented on Andrew’s own site — some “kept returning to Pizza and a Slice of Future without seeking any course credit” (andrewmaynard.net llms.txt, captured 2026-08-05).
- Elicited testimony: the transformative-mentorship pattern comes from Andrew Maynard directly (2026-08-05). No student is named here; individual stories await elicitation and clearance before they can be told publicly.
- Accurate current status: FIS 394 is paused — “currently not being offered” as of August 2026 (futureofbeinghuman.asu.edu). It is designed, taught, and documented, not currently enrollable. The pedagogy it embodies continues in the initiative’s Thunderbird phase.
Fuller detail — which cohorts, how many returned, what students said in their own words — awaits a dedicated elicitation session with Andrew.
What this evidences: the Philosophy claim that the most consequential impact is real, observable in testimony, and destroyed by attempts to instrument it — teaching as catalysis, with care as the input that counts.