AI tools are already in every workplace and every classroom. This course is about using them competently rather than either fearing them or trusting them blindly.
We cover what these systems are actually doing, how to prompt one usefully, how to check its output, where the data you type goes, and the specific ways they fail — confident wrong answers above all.
We also talk plainly about academic honesty, because our students are in school and this matters.
Jobs this leads towards
Real roles people do after this course and the ones that follow it.
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AI-literate office worker
Uses assistants for drafting, summarising and research in almost any office job — and knows when not to trust them.
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Prompt engineer / AI operations
Writes and tests the instructions that make an AI tool behave reliably for a team.
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Data or research assistant
Gathers and checks information; AI tools are now a standard part of the kit.
Is this for me?
Ninety seconds, no wrong answers, nothing recorded. It tells you how closely this course matches what you enjoy — and where to look if it does not.
What a week looks like
Day to day, so nobody is surprised.
- Two hours a week: half explanation, half doing it on a real dataset.
- Each week ends with a chart, a script or a result you can show somebody.
- You use AI tools every session, and you check what they get wrong.
- A small project of your own choosing for the last three weeks.
Three questions from week one
Get them wrong and you belong here. Get them right and you belong here too. Nothing is recorded.
Books worth having
None of these is required — the course lends what it needs. These are the ones worth owning.
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Automate the Boring Stuff with Python
Al Sweigart
Free to read online; the course uses several chapters.
Find it ↗
What to bring
Usually nothing. Where something small helps, it is here.
- ▸Nothing to buy: free tools throughout.
- ▸A free account on Kaggle for datasets.
- ▸A notebook for questions you want the data to answer.
Do this at home
Between sessions. Ten to twenty minutes; the people who do this are the ones who finish.
- Habit 1Find a dataset about something you care about and open it in a spreadsheet.
- Habit 2Ask an AI tool a question you know the answer to. Grade it.
- Habit 3Write ten lines of Python a day, even if they are the same ten lines.
What you will be able to do
- Get a genuinely useful result out of an AI assistant
- Verify an AI answer before relying on it
- Explain in plain language what a language model is and is not doing
- Understand what happens to information you put into these tools
- Know where using AI is appropriate for schoolwork and where it is not
What you will use
- Claude
- ChatGPT
- Microsoft Copilot
- Local open models
What the course covers
1 lesson · 25 minutes
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1
25 min
Week 1 — What these tools are
What a language model actually does
Before using an AI tool well, it helps to know what is happening underneath. It is not looking anything up.
The lessons themselves — videos, files and practice — open once you are registered and approved.