About This Curriculum

Curriculum concepts

This course introduces high school students to the fundamentals of applied AI using large language models, the technology behind tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Students learn core concepts in prompt engineering, context engineering, and information processing that they can use to solve real-world problems in work, education, and life. The curriculum is organized around five key concepts, shown below.

Prompt Engineering. Students learn the fundamentals of instructing large language models with language. They learn how to design prompts that incorporate complex logic to guide AI.
Context Engineering. Students learn how to give AI the information it needs to do a task. They learn how to provide documents, images, data, and other information to clarify their prompts.
Learning by Example. Students learn how to teach AI a task by showing it examples of what they want. They learn how examples can communicate rules, formats, and behavior without having to describe everything explicitly.
Personas. Students learn how to tell AI who or what to act as. They learn how to apply personas to shape the knowledge, perspective, process, and behavior that AI uses when performing a task.
Information Processing. Students learn how to use AI to extract, transform, and organize information.

The curriculum uses the term “programming AI.” This phrase may sound like it requires students to have prior background in programming. They do not. Programming here means writing clear instructions in plain language. The instruction "Take whatever number I give you and double it" is a program. It is written in English. Students learn to program with their own language, not a programming language. What matters is logic. Students learn to think through what they want and say it clearly enough that AI follows their instructions correctly.

This is not a computer science course. It requires no knowledge of AI, no advanced math, and no prior programming. Any high school student who can read and write well can take it.

Certificate of completion

Track each student's progress through the modules and assignments. Award a Certificate of AI Foundations from your school to students who complete all of the material and assignments at a satisfactory level. The catalog in the appendix describes what satisfactory completion looks like for each module.

Going further with a Vanderbilt certificate

Students who want to go further can earn a certificate from Vanderbilt University through Coursera by completing the Honors AI & AI Agents for High School Students Specialization. It has three courses. The first covers prompt engineering and prompt patterns. The second covers how AI agents combine AI, tools, and actions to accomplish goals. The third covers trustworthy and responsible use of generative AI. A student who has finished this curriculum will be well equipped to complete it.

What students need

Students need access to an LLM-based AI tool, such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. The curriculum teaches patterns that work across tools rather than the features of a specific product.

About the curriculum author

Jules White is Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University and Senior Advisor to the Chancellor on Generative AI in Enterprise and Education. His online courses on AI and large language models have ~1.3 million students enrolled from over 1,000 companies globally. He has published over 180 papers. He is the 2024 Coursera Innovation Award winner and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award recipient.

More information is available on his Coursera instructor profile.