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Session 17 of 24 — AI Builder

AI Builder · Session 17 of 24⏱ 30 min · 👨‍👩‍👧 Parent aware

🎯 Advanced Prompting

Master the techniques professionals use every day.

🎯 Today's goal: Your child learns four professional-grade prompting techniques — the skills that separate casual AI users from people who get genuinely great results.

🔥 Warm Up — 3 minutes

Warm Up

"You know the basics of prompting. Today we go to the advanced techniques that professional AI users use."

"Four techniques. Each one you will use for the rest of your life."

🤖 The Activity — 20 minutes

Main Activity

Technique 1 — Few-shot prompting
Show AI what you want by example before asking.

📋 Type this exactly
Here are two examples of the kind of title I want: Example 1: 'The Day the Ocean Remembered' — Example 2: 'Everything We Carry Without Knowing' — Now give me 5 more titles in exactly this style for a collection of short stories about families.

Compare the output to what you would have got without examples. Ask: Why did giving examples produce better results?

Technique 2 — Step-by-step reasoning
Ask AI to show its work.

📋 Type this exactly
Think through this step by step, showing your reasoning at each stage: A class of 30 students took a test. 18 scored above 70%. Of those, half scored above 90%. 4 students failed completely (under 40%). How many students scored between 40% and 70%? Show every step.

Check the answer: 30 - 15 - 3 - 4 = 8 students. Did AI get it right? Did it show its working clearly?

Technique 3 — Constraint stacking
Layer multiple constraints to get exactly what you need.

📋 Type this exactly
Write a product description for a backpack. Constraints: under 50 words, no adjectives that could apply to any backpack (no 'spacious', 'durable', 'stylish'), must include one specific and unusual feature, must end with a question that makes the reader want to know more.

Remove one constraint at a time and see how the output changes. Each constraint matters.

Technique 4 — Iterative refinement
Your child picks any output from today and improves it through three rounds of specific feedback. Round 1: what specifically is weak? Round 2: improve that specific thing. Round 3: final polish.

🧩 The Twist — 5 minutes

Deep Dive
📋 Type this exactly
What prompting technique would you add to this list — one I have not mentioned? Describe it and give an example of when it would be most useful.

AI will suggest real techniques. Ask your child: Have you used anything like this without knowing it had a name?

🛡️ Safety Moment
“AI makes mistakes — always check”

Advanced techniques produce better outputs — and still produce wrong outputs. Better prompts reduce errors but do not eliminate them. The verification habit matters even more when you are producing more sophisticated results.

👨‍👩‍👧 Parent: read this aloud. Ask your child to repeat it back.
🎯

Advanced Prompter Badge 🎯

Mastered four professional prompting techniques — few-shot, step-by-step, constraint stacking, and iterative refinement

👨‍👩‍👧

Parent Notes — tap to expand

▼
What they learned

Advanced prompting mastery — the four techniques used by professionals. Each one is immediately applicable and genuinely improves output quality.

Questions to ask
  • Which technique produced the biggest improvement?
  • Where would constraint stacking be most useful in real life?
  • What happens when you combine multiple techniques in one prompt?
What to watch for

Some children at this point are genuinely impressive AI users. Acknowledge it. These are real skills.

Safety in context

Advanced prompting means advanced outputs — which also means there is more to verify. The sophistication of the output does not change the need to check facts.

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