The Course at a Glance
Inside the Machine
Build a tiny language model with dice, train a classifier with your own data, and find out where AI gets its answers — and why it sometimes makes them up.
Working With AI
Prompting, checking, and teaming up. Learn what AI is good at, where it fails, and how to use it to do your own work better — without handing over your thinking.
AI in the World
Bias, jobs, creativity, and the tools shaping both. Explore how AI is really used at work, then design a responsible AI solution for a problem you choose.
Welcome to Principles of AI
Welcome in. AI is already in your phone, your feed, and soon your job. This class is about understanding what it actually is, using it well, and knowing when not to trust it.
We start by opening the machine: building small models by hand and training one with your own data. Then we put AI to work — learning to prompt it, check it, and team up with it. Finally we look at AI in the world: who it helps, who it can harm, and how people really use it at work. You finish by designing a responsible AI solution of your own.
You don't need to code or know any math beyond what you already have. Bring curiosity and a willingness to question what a confident machine tells you.
The running record where you note when you used AI, what you asked, and what you checked.
Open →Prompt patterns that work, with examples and the mistakes to avoid.
Open →Break any job or task into pieces and decide which parts AI helps with and which stay human. Print it.
⭐ Open & print →Course Resources
What the class is and what a week looks like.
Pacing GuideAll 11 weeks, period by period.
Course SyllabusGrading, expectations, AI-use policy.
Standards CrosswalkHow the course lines up with PLTW, AI4K12, NGSS, UNESCO and more.
Sources & ReadingVetted references behind every unit.
AI GlossaryPlain-language definitions for every term used in class.
A Note About AI
- Generate course images
- Build the interactive tools and worksheets
- Format and lay out lesson content consistently
- Draft activity instructions and rubrics
This is a class about AI, so of course you'll use it — and I used it to build the course. The skill is knowing what to hand off and what to keep. AI can sound completely sure while being completely wrong, so check it against real sources, and log how you used it. The line is between using AI to learn and using it to skip learning.