AI Fundamentals with Julio Bernard
"AI is a tool that rewards understanding and exposes the absence of it."
What students do
Over three weeks, students build three small projects, each designed to teach a specific layer of how these tools actually work. A game show study app that reveals how AI handles context, instructions, structure, and iteration as students turn their own notes into something playable. A project that uses real-world inputs from their device, like location, camera, or audio, while teaching them to request only the permissions and features the app actually needs. A personal dashboard or interactive tool that pulls live data from the internet, stores it responsibly, and turns it into something genuinely 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.
About the mentor
Julio Bernard guides the engineering team building SeqHub's AI co-teacher and has spent his career making coding accessible through years of building software, helping aspiring developers build real skills, and teaching computer science to younger students. This summer he leads Discovery, giving students not just the ability to use AI but a developer's understanding of what it actually is.