Beyond the Prompt: Building Real Products with AI

Location: Mount St. Mary’s University, Frederick Campus – 5350 Spectrum Dr., Frederick, MD 21703

Description: You’ve mastered the basics of chatting with AI. Now what? This hands-on 4-hour course teaches the Design Engineering Practice — a repeatable, tool-agnostic playbook for turning an idea into a working prototype with AI as your engineering partner. The practice produces structured, well-documented code that a developer would be happy to inherit — so what you build becomes a real starting point for an engineering team, not a throwaway demo that has to be rebuilt from scratch. You’ll work in small groups of 3-5, choose from a curated shortlist of product concepts (or bring your own idea), and walk away with a working prototype on your laptop and a way of working you can apply Monday morning at your organization. No coding experience required — just comfort with chat-based AI tools like Claude, Copilot, or Gemini, a laptop, and a willingness to bring your brain.