A free 8-week curriculum to build real AI fluency — no coding required. Focused on business, entrepreneurship, and building a portfolio of real projects.
A practical, hands-on guide to building real AI fluency
Each week has a 1-hour lesson to work through, followed by 3–4 hours of hands-on exercises and a mini-project to complete independently. Weekends are for the project.
Every tool used in this curriculum is either free or has a free tier sufficient for the exercises. No paid subscriptions required. No coding required.
Each week produces a tangible deliverable — a market analysis, a business plan, a pitch deck, a website. By Week 8, you'll have a portfolio of 6+ real projects.
AI is a thinking partner, not a replacement for thinking. Every exercise emphasizes judgment, verification, and adding human insight on top of AI output. The goal is fluency, not dependency.
Write a one-page document (using an AI to help draft it, but with your own thinking and edits) that busts 5 common AI myths for your classmates. Examples: "AI is smarter than humans," "AI will take all jobs," "AI always tells the truth." For each myth, explain the reality. This becomes Portfolio Piece #1.
If you're new to AI and want a slower, hand-held walkthrough, read this section before doing the exercises above. Total reading time: about 15 minutes.
A modern AI chatbot is a "next-word predictor" trained on a huge chunk of the internet. It doesn't know things the way you do — it has learned patterns of language. When it sounds confident and wrong, that's not lying; it's predicting plausible-sounding text. This is why we say it "hallucinates."
Privacy tip: By default, free chatbots may use your conversations to train future models. In each tool's settings, look for "Data Controls" or "Improve the model for everyone" and turn it off if you'd rather not contribute. Don't paste anything truly sensitive (medical info, passwords, your social security number) into any AI ever.
Pick a topic only you would know well. Examples: a small local restaurant in your town, your grandfather's career, the rules of a niche video game, a school club you ran. Ask each AI for "5 facts" about it.
Build a Google Doc or Notion page with your "Top 10 Prompts" — reusable prompt templates for tasks you care about (homework help, brainstorming ideas, summarizing articles, writing emails, etc.). Each prompt should include the template, an example, and a note on why it works. This is a living document you'll keep expanding all summer.
Last week you learned that AI is a powerful but unreliable friend. This week you learn how to actually talk to that friend. Prompting is the difference between getting a generic answer and getting something genuinely useful.
Almost every great prompt has some combination of these five ingredients. Memorize them. They will serve you for the rest of the curriculum.
Instead of describing what you want, just show it. Pattern:
This single trick will outperform almost any other technique. The model is a pattern-matcher; give it a pattern.
For anything that needs reasoning — comparisons, math, decisions, recommendations — add this magic phrase: "Think step by step before giving your final answer." Output quality often jumps noticeably. (Newer "reasoning" models do this automatically, but the phrase still helps with anything else.)
Pick an industry or trend you're curious about (e.g., AI tutoring, sustainable fashion, esports, plant-based food). Use Perplexity and ChatGPT to research market size, key players, growth trends, and consumer demographics. Compile a 2-page "Market Opportunity Brief" — the kind a real startup founder would write before launching a product. Portfolio Piece #2.
This week is where AI starts to feel like a superpower. You can do in 30 minutes what used to take a research analyst a full afternoon. The catch: an unverified shortcut is worse than no shortcut at all.
When AI cites a source, ask yourself the CRAAP test (real acronym, sorry):
When you have a finding from one AI, paste it into a different AI and ask: "Find the three weakest claims in this analysis and explain what evidence would be needed to verify them." Two AIs disagreeing is how you find the soft spots in a story.
Write a 600–800 word blog post about the market opportunity you researched last week. The catch: write the first draft entirely yourself. Then use AI to get feedback, improve it, and polish it. The final product should be clearly yours, but demonstrably better because of how you used AI in the process. Document your drafting process (before/after). Portfolio Piece #3.
The most important sentence of this entire week: let AI improve your writing, not replace it. Anyone can paste a topic into ChatGPT and get 600 words of perfectly bland mush. The skill — and the value — is in keeping your voice while making everything around it sharper.
AI defaults to corporate-LinkedIn neutral. If you don't fight it, you'll write like everyone else. Counter-prompts:
Different contexts have different rules. Sort your writing tasks into three buckets:
Create a 10-slide pitch deck for a business idea (real or invented) using Gamma AI as a starting point, then customize in Canva or Google Slides. Include: problem, solution, market size, competition, business model, team, and a clear ask. This is the kind of deck real founders show to investors. Portfolio Piece #4.
Five years ago, "I'm not a designer" was a real excuse. This week, that excuse expires. With AI, the bottleneck moves from making visuals to knowing what looks good — which is a much faster skill to build.
Most beginners type three words: "logo for bakery." Then they wonder why the result looks like every other AI bakery logo on Earth. A great image prompt has five layers:
AI image tools can now generate convincing photos of real people doing things they never did. This is not theoretical — it's happening in elections, harassment campaigns, and scams.
Design and build a Notion-based "command center" for your hypothetical business. Include pages for: daily tasks, customer research notes (with AI summaries), a content calendar, and a competitive tracker. Set up at least one Zapier automation that feeds data into it. Portfolio Piece #5.
This is the week most people have their "wait, I can do this?" moment. Automation used to require a programmer. Now it requires patience and a free Zapier account.
Every automation, no matter how complex, is built from this one shape:
You can chain actions. Trigger → Action → Action → Action. That's the whole game. Most "complex" workflows are just a chain of these dominos.
We'll build: "When I label a Gmail message 'AI-101', summarize it with ChatGPT and add the summary to a Google Sheet."
AI-101.AI-101 label. Test it (label any email so Zapier can grab a sample)./database and pick "Table — inline." Add columns: Title, Status (select), Due, Priority./calendar for a calendar view. Add columns for Channel, Status, AI-drafted copy.Choose one of these, or pitch your own idea:
Use AI to find a product opportunity, write copy, design branding in Canva, build a simple one-page site (Carrd.co or Lovable), and create a marketing plan. Go from idea to "ready to launch" in one week.
Research a niche topic, use AI to help write and edit 3 issues, design them in Canva or Substack, and send to friends/family. Build a real subscriber list.
Identify a genuine problem in your school or community. Use AI to research it, propose a solution, build a presentation, and pitch it to someone who could actually implement it (a teacher, local business owner, etc.).
Use Lovable or a similar AI app builder to create a functional web app that solves a problem you care about — a study group organizer, a local events finder, a personal finance tracker.
Six weeks of skills, one week to assemble them. This is your "Avengers, assemble" moment — every tool from Weeks 1–6 has a role, and the project is the team-up movie.
Monday — Pick & Validate (~2 hrs)
Tuesday — Plan (~2 hrs)
Wednesday — Build, Part 1 (~2.5 hrs)
Thursday — Build, Part 2 (~2.5 hrs)
Friday + Weekend — Document & Present (~2 hrs)
Anything you ship to a real audience — even 5 people — multiplies what you learn by 10×. Force it. Email your newsletter to family. Share your site in a Discord. Pitch your "solve a real problem" presentation to an actual teacher or business owner.
A live portfolio page with all your projects, an "about me" section, and your AI Journey essay. Share the link. This is the thing you'll put on applications — tangible proof that you understand AI, can use it effectively, and think critically about it. That puts you ahead of 99% of applicants your age.
Week 8 is the credits-scene week — but in a Marvel way, not a "everyone leaves the theater" way. The work this week is what turns the last seven weeks from "things I did" into "evidence of who I am."
You have two clean options. Pick whichever feels easier.
Option A — Carrd (simplest, ~45 min):
yourname.carrd.co URL — or upgrade ($19/yr) to use a custom domain.Option B — Notion public page (~30 min):
Structure your capstone presentation like this:
The field moves fast. These are the inputs worth keeping in your weekly diet:
You don't need to be an AI expert. This curriculum is designed to learn by doing. Many of the exercises work great with a study partner, but they're equally effective working solo — compare approaches with a friend, classmate, or parent if you can.
Focus on the discussions. The exercises build skills, but the discussion questions build judgment. AI fluency isn't just knowing which buttons to press — it's knowing when to trust the output, when to push back, and when to do the thinking yourself. Those conversations are the most valuable part.
Embrace the struggle. Resist the urge to give up when a prompt doesn't work. The process of trying, failing, and iterating is exactly how prompt engineering skill develops. A bad result is a learning opportunity, not a dead end.
Make it real. If the capstone project involves a real business idea, a real community problem, or a real audience — even a tiny one — the motivation and learning multiply dramatically. An email newsletter with 12 subscribers is infinitely more educational than a hypothetical one with none.
Free tools and references used throughout the curriculum