From Understanding to Creation: A Prerequisite-Free AI Literacy Course with Technical Depth Across Majors
Amarda Shehu

TL;DR
This paper presents UNIV 182, a prerequisite-free AI literacy course for undergraduates across majors that combines technical depth with ethical reasoning and practical projects, demonstrating effective pedagogical strategies.
Contribution
The paper introduces a novel, scalable course design integrating technical depth, ethics, and hands-on projects for AI literacy across diverse academic backgrounds.
Findings
Student artifacts show progression from intuition-based to technically grounded reasoning.
Course design enables broad accessibility while maintaining technical depth.
Students successfully build and defend AI-enabled artifacts in final projects.
Abstract
Most AI literacy courses for non-technical undergraduates emphasize conceptual breadth over technical depth. This paper describes UNIV 182, a prerequisite-free course at George Mason University that teaches undergraduates across majors to understand, use, evaluate, and build AI systems. The course is organized around five mechanisms: (1) a unifying conceptual pipeline (problem definition, data, model selection, evaluation, reflection) traversed repeatedly at increasing sophistication; (2) concurrent integration of ethical reasoning with the technical progression; (3) AI Studios, structured in-class work sessions with documentation protocols and real-time critique; (4) a cumulative assessment portfolio in which each assignment builds competencies required by the next, culminating in a co-authored field experiment on chatbot reasoning and a final project in which teams build AI-enabled…
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