AI 2010 · Introduction to Applied AI · Spring 2027 · draft course outline for the phase 0a pilot
AI 2010 is Iowa State's introductory applied AI course for non-majors, the course that led to the university-wide Applied AI Minor. About 150 students in spring 2027, three lectures a week plus a weekly lab, no programming prerequisite. This outline shows where the three Team Bots appear, which assignments allow AI and at what level, and what is measured each week. Topics follow the existing syllabus; only the bot layer is new.
| Bot | Role | Rules, in plain words |
|---|---|---|
| Tutor | Every student, all term | Hints and questions first; a worked example of a different problem; the final answer only after three attempts, then explained. Never a submission-ready artifact. |
| Lab partner | Weekly lab, in the room | Works only on the sandbox: a sample CRM, a mailbox of synthetic tickets, a demo storefront. Explains every action before running it; stops for approval on anything that writes. |
| Monday routine | One shared routine, weekly | Compiles the week's reading questions and a short news digest for the discipline themes that week. Read-only; no connectors beyond the web. |
Each assignment carries one of five levels from the AI Assessment Scale (Perkins, Roe and Furze). The level is not a sentence in the syllabus; it is which bot is open and how it is configured.
| Level | Where it appears | Secured by |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · No AI | Two in-class quizzes, final exam | In person, supervised, bots unpublished for the session |
| 2 · Planning | Reflection essays (weeks 3, 9) | Short in-class write from the plan |
| 3 · Collaboration | Four lab reports, discipline case study | Transcript submitted with the work; sampled ten-minute conversations |
| 4 · Full AI | Midterm project | Covered by the level-1 assessments |
| 5 · Exploration | Capstone: build your own bot | Live demo is the viva |
| Wk | Topic | Bot use and assessment |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | What AI is and is not; course rules | Join the team; tutor warm-up; AI-use statement signed |
| 2 | Prompting and evaluating outputs | Lab 1: make the tutor wrong, then prove it |
| 3 | How language models work, in plain terms | Reflection 1 (level 2) |
| 4 | Data: where it comes from, what it costs | Lab 2 on the sandbox CRM (level 3) |
| 5 | Agents: tools, actions, approval | Lab partner introduced; quiz 1 (level 1) |
| 6 | Supervising an agent: read, catch, fix | Lab 3: "catch the bot" with planted faults |
| 7 | AI in business and agriculture | Midterm project brief (level 4) |
| 8 | AI in health, education and public services | Midterm project due; mid-term usage note to SpaceXSI |
| 9 | Bias, error and accountability | Reflection 2 (level 2) |
| 10 | Privacy, security and data terms | Lab 4: what the bot may not touch; quiz 2 (level 1) |
| 11 | Designing a bot for a real task | Capstone brief; students start their own bot (level 5) |
| 12 | Build week | Instructor's tutor acts as reviewer |
| 13 | Demos | Live demos; sampled conversations on lab reports |
| 14 | What changes next; review | Final exam (level 1); bots unpublished |
| Measure | How | Useful to |
|---|---|---|
| Usage per seat per week | Tracked from week 2; plan of record is two tutor sessions per student per week plus the shared routine | SpaceXSI: where a Teams seat runs out in a real section |
| Whether Teams-tier controls are enough | Log of every moment the instructor wanted an Enterprise control (audit log, enforced rule, action recording) and why | SpaceXSI: which control a department would buy next |
| Learning | Quiz and exam scores against the Fall 2026 section taught without the bots; capstone rubric | ISU and the public write-up |
| Integrity | Share of sampled conversations where the student could explain the transcript | Both |
ISU: two instructors and four TAs, one named course-team admin, the course material and the three class bots, a comparison section taught without the bots, and the public write-up with a factual review by SpaceXSI before release. SpaceXSI: education credit for 156 seats for the semester, in whatever form is simplest, a named contact, and a 30-minute onboarding for the instructors. Nothing on this page requires a feature SpaceXSI does not ship today.
Adisak Sukul · Teaching Professor of Computer Science, Iowa State University · adisaksukul.com · linkedin.com/in/adisaksukul · Full proposal and evidence: adisaksukul.com/spacexsi-education. Independent; not affiliated with SpaceX, SpaceXSI or Cursor.