In the 2025-26 school year, the computer science & innovation department will offer the school’s first artificial intelligence-focused course. The Advanced Coding for Artificial Intelligence course will introduce students to AI programming and the technical foundations behind the technology.
Computer science teacher Andrew Heine, who designed the course, said he thought the decision to introduce AI into the curriculum was a natural step given its growing relevance.
“AI is in the public consciousness. It seems like it’s not just a short-term fad, but is most likely going to be a core part of modern technology,” Heine said. “I’ll do the best I can to give students the skills to stay relevant and understand how automation combines with the skills that they already have.”
The course will have three core pillars. The first focuses on programming skills, with students developing applications using an AI Application Programming Interface (API)—pre-built tools that allow users to integrate artificial intelligence into code without having to build an AI model from scratch.
Heine said the class builds on what students learn in Foundations in Programming, a prerequisite course. “Students are going to make a program that’s not just one file,” Heine said. “Using other tools like APIs is the focus of all the level two computer science classes.”
The second pillar of the class will cover technical aspects of AI, including how machine learning models function. Students will build a basic neural network (a way to teach a computer to process things similarly to how the human brain processes), working with an image classifier that can distinguish between different objects.
While the class won’t have the resources to train large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, students will get hands-on experience building smaller models to understand how they process and learn from data.
The third pillar addresses the ethical and societal implications of AI. Students will explore issues like AI-generated misinformation, algorithmic bias and responsible AI use. Rather than just discussing these topics in the abstract, Heine said, the class will take an experimental approach by designing and testing AI applications.
“We will talk about responsible AI use and the hallucinations AI programs can make,” Heine said. “Once we’ve discussed and researched that, we can run experiments to see the things that go right and really, really wrong with AI models.”
To add the class to the course of study, Heine submitted a proposal outlining the learning objectives and assessment methods to the Curriculum Review Committee, a group of faculty members who evaluate new courses. After approval, the course was included in the 2025-26 Course of Study.
The final step will take place this summer when Heine will design lesson plans and course materials. “The biggest part for a new course, the most time that gets spent, is usually over a summer,” he said.
While the class will primarily focus on technical skills, Heine acknowledged that AI’s ethical and societal questions extend beyond what a coding course can fully cover. “Building a thorough perspective on the impact of AI might be beyond the scope of this course,” he said. “I do want to have guest speakers and make it cross-disciplinary to build context.”
Junior Andrew Bennett, who recently completed Foundations in Programming, said he thinks studying AI is essential. “I think AI has become an increasingly important aspect of everything we do in our lives today,” Bennett said. “It would be cool to learn how to use it to help other people and make cool projects.”
The course has a prerequisite of Foundations in Programming, but it could appeal to students whose main interests don’t include computer science. “Not everybody is interested in coding,” Bennett said. “But I think a lot of people are interested in the AI aspect of the course.”
As AI continues to evolve, Heine said a challenge will be keeping the curriculum up to date. “The question is, is the technology stable enough to where we can say something and trust that it’s going to be future-proof,” he said. “But I think we just have to do the best we can.”
“ As AI becomes more prevalent, I think it’s crucial to foster a generation of ethically aware digital citizens, and it looks like this class will do that,” junior Sebastion Butts said.