Going Further: The Vanderbilt Honors Specialization

Where this curriculum leads

A student who finishes this curriculum can do something most people cannot: write a prompt that is a program, supply the context an LLM needs, teach it by example, direct it with a persona, and process real information with it. Those are the foundations of prompt engineering, and they are the same foundations that Vanderbilt University teaches in its honors program for high school students on Coursera.

Students who want to build on this curriculum and earn a university certificate can complete the Honors AI & AI Agents for High School Students Specialization from Vanderbilt University. It is a three-course, honors-level specialization taught by the author of this curriculum. On completing it, students receive Vanderbilt University certificates through Coursera that they can share on a college application, a resume, or a LinkedIn profile.

Why it is worth doing

The skills in this curriculum will matter in every field, and most students will not have them. A Vanderbilt certificate shows a college, an employer, or a program that a student invested in serious preparation, understands both the power and the limits of AI, and can lead AI rather than just use it. That is a way to stand out, and it is one that any student who has completed this curriculum can reach.

The specialization also goes further than this curriculum does. It covers prompt patterns in more depth, introduces AI agents, and takes up the question of when generative AI is trustworthy and when it is not. Those are the natural next steps after the material here.

The three courses

1. Honors AI Foundations for High School Students. About 19 hours. Prompt engineering and prompt patterns for working with large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Its modules cover an introduction to prompts, three sets of prompt patterns, and few-shot examples. Students who have completed this curriculum will recognize much of it: the persona pattern, few-shot prompting, chain of thought, and the idea that a prompt is a program all appear here in more depth, along with patterns this curriculum does not cover.
2. Honors AI Agents for High School Students. About 6 hours. How AI agents combine AI, tools, and actions to accomplish goals, and the fundamental ideas behind designing intelligent agents. This picks up where the persona module leaves off: an agent is what a persona becomes when it can take actions in the world, not only produce words.
3. Honors Trustworthy & Responsible AI for High School Students. About 9 hours. Which problems make sense to solve with generative AI, how to frame problems and write prompts that produce more trustworthy results, and why human judgment remains part of every successful AI workflow. This extends the context module's work on hallucination and rules for missing information into a full treatment of when to trust AI and how to verify it.

How to approach it

Students who finish this curriculum arrive at the specialization already fluent in its core ideas, so the first course will move quickly. The best use of that head start is to read the material in each course closely rather than skim what looks familiar. Where a pattern appears that this curriculum did not cover, try it on a problem of your own, the same way the assignments here asked you to adapt every concept to your own situation. Where a familiar pattern appears, notice what the course adds to it.

Treat the second and third courses as new territory. Agents and trustworthy AI are where the field is going, and they are where a student can differentiate themselves most. A student who can explain how an agent uses tools to reach a goal, and who can say which problems generative AI should and should not be trusted with, has a foundation that most adults working with AI today do not have.

The specialization is available on Coursera. The instructor and the school can decide whether to fold it into the course, offer it as an honors extension, or simply point students toward it. Any of those works. The point is that a student who has completed this curriculum is ready for it.