Computer Science Offers Two New Courses in AI Literacy, Problem-Solving
This fall, the Department of Computer Science is offering two courses built on a simple premise: You don’t need to know how to code to work seriously with AI. Neither course assumes any computer science background and both are open to students in any major. They are aimed at different points in a student’s career.
Understanding and Using AI (CSCI 1100) is a lower-division undergraduate course on what AI can do, what it can’t and how to use it responsibly. AI-Assisted Problem Solving (AI 5000/CSCI 4930/CSCI 5930) is for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, and turns AI into a research partner for your own discipline, whether that’s health sciences, business, the humanities or wherever you work.
For Undergraduates Getting Started: Understanding and Using AI
CSCI 1100 introduces the foundations, capabilities and limitations of modern AI systems. Students experiment with AI tools, question their outputs, and learn the science behind how they work, so they can use AI with curiosity, skepticism, and confidence in school, work, and civic life. The course is organized around three ideas:
- Understand the science. Learn how chatbots, image generators and recommender systems actually produce their outputs.
- Experiment, then question. Test tools, compare their successes and failures, and ask how data and design shape what they do.
- Use AI responsibly. Recognize bias, privacy risks, fairness questions and the danger of overreliance.
By the end, students can explain at a high level how modern AI systems operate, connect training data and model design to the behavior they see, spot hallucinations and misleading or adversarial outputs, assess ethical and societal implications, and communicate an AI system’s strengths and weaknesses in multiple formats.
The course meets 11 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, is worth three credit hours and fulfills the Natural and Applied Sciences core requirement. There are no prerequisites: No prior CS coursework, no coding, no math requirement and no materials to purchase. Coursework runs on interactive demos and guided activities, readings drawn from science and society, and discussion of AI in school, work and culture. CSCI 1100 is taught by Abby Stylianou, Ph.D.
For Advanced Undergraduates and Graduate Students: AI-Assisted Problem Solving
Most courses about artificial intelligence start by teaching you to build AI. AI 5000 starts somewhere else: With a real problem in your field and the question of how AI can help you solve it — responsibly and with judgment you can defend.
Offered fully online and asynchronous over 14 weeks, the course is open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students with no computer science experience. It fits around work and life at roughly ten hours a week and every example is drawn from a real discipline — health sciences, business, STEM, the humanities or your own.
The goal isn’t to paste a prompt and hope. Over the semester, students learn to dig into real problems with AI, question and verify what it gives back and build a repeatable process they can trust. The course is organized around three ideas:
- Research your field, faster. Use AI to gather, clean and make sense of real data and literature in your own discipline — the actual work of getting from a messy question to something you can analyze.
- Judgment, not just prompts. Learn to catch hallucinations, bia and overconfident answers, and — just as important — know when to trust an AI’s output, when to refine it and when to override it entirely.
- Ship a real deliverable. The course ends with an AI-assisted solution to an authentic problem in your field: Built, defended, and yours.
The course is deliberately field-agnostic. A health sciences student and a humanities student sit in the same course and work on entirely different problems — the method transfers, the domain is yours. Coursework is interactive and project-based, with weekly peer interaction and hands-on experience using the latest AI tools.
Every student picks a real problem in their own discipline and builds a complete, AI-assisted solution to it then defends the human judgment behind every step. The deliverable is meant to be authentic and usable, not a classroom exercise: something students can carry back into their field and their work.
Which One Is for You?
- CSCI 1100 is for undergraduates early in their studies who want to understand the technology reshaping their field, and to earn a core science credit while they do it. It meets on campus and assumes nothing.
- CSCI 1100 also serves as the first required course in the department’s AI Literacy Microcredential, a 10-credit credential open to any undergraduate major.
- AI 5000 is for advanced undergraduates and graduate students who already have a problem they want to solve and want to use AI to solve it. It runs online and asynchronously and it ends with something you built.
Both courses run in fall 2026. Students interested in enrolling are encouraged to speak with their academic advisor or contact the Department of Computer Science. AI-Assisted Problem Solving is offered as AI 5000, CSCI 4930 or CSCI 5930, and is taught by David Letscher, Ph.D.