Intro to AI
Learn the core AI skills — and finish by building a small app of your own.
This short track takes you from "what is an AI assistant?" to actually shipping something with one. The lessons teach skills that work with any AI tool — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and others. Then a hands-on capstone puts them to work: you will build and ship a small interactive app, start to finish.
Short, hands-on lessons (a few minutes of reading each) plus the capstone project. No coding background assumed.
Lessons
Lesson 1What AI Assistants Actually Are
Hands-on: predict, sort, and self-check your way through how large language models work — what Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot have in common, and where they fall short.
Lesson 2How AI Predicts the Next Word
Hands-on: the same blank, two different sentences — and why your best guess flips. Meet conditional probability, the simple "given what you already know" idea that drives every answer an AI gives.
Lesson 3Working with an AI Assistant
Hands-on: how to direct an AI on a real project — giving context, scoping tasks, pausing before risky changes, and checking the result against what the AI claims.
Lesson 4Prompting Well and Checking the Output
Hands-on: the two skills that matter most — writing a clear prompt, and never trusting an answer you have not verified.
Lesson 5From Idea to a Working MVP
Hands-on: how a small app goes from a rough idea to something real — defining the smallest useful version, planning steps, building, testing, and iterating.
Capstone project
Build itBuild a Concept Manipulative
Apply everything: build a small single-page interactive app that explains one concept of your choice, taking it through the full lifecycle — idea, MVP, build, test, ship.