AI is not going away.
In fact, AI literacy is now part of digital literacy. As future developers, designers, strategists, and creative problem-solvers, you need to understand how to use AI thoughtfully, practically, and responsibly.
So let’s be clear: we want you to use AI.
We will use AI in this course. We will use it to explore ideas, troubleshoot problems, understand code, improve projects, and push our work further than we could on our own. AI can be an incredible partner in the development process.
But AI is most useful when you have enough foundational knowledge to guide it.
We need to learn the core concepts, tools, vocabulary, and problem-solving habits that make app development possible. We need to practice working through confusion, reading errors, testing ideas, and understanding how the pieces fit together.
Once that foundation is in place, we will bring AI into the process more intentionally.
At that point, AI becomes much more powerful. It is no longer a shortcut around learning. It becomes a way to extend what you know. It can help you move faster, think bigger, ask better questions, experiment with more ambitious ideas, and build something more advanced than you could have built without it.
So our approach in this class is simple:
First, learn the basics. Build the foundation. Then, use AI to build on top of it.
So avoid using AI early in this course. Have patience, commit to the grind, even when there’s a temptation to throw it in Chat. We are not avoiding AI because it is bad. We are delaying our use of it because learning comes first. Trust us here. The goal is not just to produce an app. The goal is to become the kind of person who understands what they are building, why it works, and how to make it better.
AI will be part of that process.
But it cannot replace that process.
Now, let’s learn how to build cool things!