Discovery
"You can't get anything useful out of an AI tool until you know what you're actually asking it for."
The Question
Most students who try to build with AI for the first time hit the same wall: the tool gives them something that looks impressive but doesn't actually do what they wanted. Discovery is built around the question of why that happens, and what changes when a student learns to think before they prompt. The premise is simple. AI is not a shortcut around understanding. It is a tool that rewards understanding, and exposes the absence of it.
What Students Build
Over three weeks, students build three small projects, each designed to teach a specific layer of how these tools actually work. A project that uses real-world inputs from their device, like location, camera, or audio, to interact with the world around them. A game that exposes how AI handles context and instructions, including how it can be tricked. A small simulation or interactive tool that pulls live data from the internet and turns it into something useful. By the end, students have shipped real things, debugged real failures, and developed a feel for what is actually happening when an AI tool gives them an answer.
The Mentors
Julio Bernard leads the engineering team building SeqHub's AI co-teacher, the technology that powers every program at the Academy. He is a software developer and educator who has spent his career making coding accessible, through A100, the program he ran to help aspiring developers build skills, confidence, and industry experience, and through years of teaching computer science to younger students. This summer he is leading Discovery, the entry point for students new to building with AI. His goal is not to teach students to use AI quickly. It is to give them a developer's understanding of what AI actually is, and a developer's culture: collaborative, skeptical, and built on the conviction that no one builds anything meaningful alone.
Who This Is For
Discovery is for students in grades 7 through 12 who are new to building with AI, or who have used AI tools casually but never built anything with them. No prior programming experience is required. The students who do best are the ones who get curious about how things work, who like taking things apart, and who are willing to be wrong on the way to figuring something out. Students who want a finished product handed to them will not enjoy this.
Logistics
Three weeks. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, 11:00 AM to 12:15 PM ET. Friday sessions extend to 1:00 PM for the final Demo Day. Cohorts of 6 to 8 students. $2,500. Apply by May 11, 2026.
Beyond the live sessions, students work on their own, and they are not alone when they do. Discovery is supported by a 24/7 Slack channel and a team of scholars and practitioners at the Academy. Students also work alongside SeqHub's AI co-teacher, which helps them think through problems on off days without doing the work for them. Plan for 8 to 10 hours per week, with 4.5 hours in live sessions and the rest on independent work.