Assignment: Extract, Transform, Organize

Find information you actually have to deal with that arrives in a hard-to-use form, and use the three instructions from the lesson to turn it into a form you can use. Then notice what your organization made visible and what it hid.

Student instructions

1
Step 1: Choose your information.
A group chat planning something, a page of your own notes, a recipe collection, a month of bank or card charges, a game’s rulebook, a long email thread, the instructions for a project. It should be real, it should be something you would rather not read straight through, and it should contain more than one kind of thing (dates, people, amounts, steps, places). Remove anything private before you use it.
2
Step 2: Extract.
Write an instruction that names one kind of piece to pull out, such as every date, every person, every amount, or every task. Provide the information as a separate message. Save the result and check it against the original: did AI find everything, and did it add anything that was not there?
3
Step 3: Transform.
Write an instruction that puts every extracted piece into one common form: one date format, one unit, one sentence shape, one row of a table. Run it on the result of Step 2. Save the result and write one sentence on anything the transform lost.
4
Step 4: Organize.
Write an instruction that arranges the transformed pieces in an order or in groups that answers a question you actually have. Save the result.
5
Step 5: Organize a second way.
Ask for the same pieces organized by a different rule. Write two or three sentences on what the second organization shows that the first hid, and which one you would keep.
6
Step 6: All three in one instruction.
Start a new conversation. Write one instruction that names what to extract, what form to transform it into, and how to organize it, and produces the finished thing you need: an outline, a table, a schedule, a shopping list, a spending summary. Provide the original information again. Then ask AI to expand one bullet or row, showing the whole result again with that part expanded. Note where the added detail came from: your information, what AI already knows, or invention.

What to turn in

The information

The original, with anything private removed, and one sentence on why it was hard to use.

The three instructions

Your extract instruction and its result, with a note on anything AI missed or added.
Your transform instruction and its result, with your sentence on what the transform lost.
Your organize instruction and its result.

The second organization

The second instruction and its result, and your sentences on what it revealed, what it hid, and which one you would keep.

The finished thing

Your combined instruction from Step 6 and the whole conversation, including the expanded bullet or row and your note on where the added detail came from.

We are looking at whether you can write each of the three instructions on your own, whether you checked what came back against the original, and whether you noticed that the organization was a choice. The choices are yours. AI did the reading and the arranging.

Bonus

Hand your finished result to a classmate who has never seen the original. Can they use it? What question do they ask that your organization did not answer?