Southside High launches prompt engineering class; students emphasize ethics and hands‑on projects

Southside High School introduced a new prompt engineering course that teaches students how to design prompts for AI tools and emphasizes ethical use, students and the show host said on the school's April Cyclone Snapshot broadcast.

The class combines practical prompt design with an explicit ethics curriculum, students said. Katori, a 10th‑grade Southside High School student, described a recent assignment: “We had a project where we had to make a children's book. And, basically, we would give AI the prompts that we wanted so we could pick what the book was about and would give us a story. And then we were allowed to also create the pictures through AI for that story.”

Jason, a senior Southside High School student, said the course starts with ethics. “The first thing that mister Bennett started us with was ethics,” Jason said. “I thought I was learning about prompts and AI. Why am I doing ethics? … In the end, I really feel like the ethics was to lead us into ethically and properly using AI.”

The broadcast host noted the class teaches students to iterate and refine prompts to get better outputs and described the course as part of an expanded computer‑science program at Southside. “We offer AP Computer Science Principles, AP Computer Science A, the Python class that Katori just mentioned, as well as our new prompt engineering class,” the host said, and added the district will pilot AP cybersecurity next year.

Students and the host described classroom work that included generating text and images with AI and building chat bots (referred to in the broadcast as “DAS”). Students said achieving desired results required repeated tweaking of prompts and attention to ethical constraints to avoid producing malicious or inappropriate outputs.

The class is presented on the Cyclone Snapshot episode as a new offering at Southside High School intended to prepare students for the growing presence of AI in work and school. Staff identified in the broadcast included the teacher referenced as “mister Bennett,” who students credited with framing the course around ethics.

School leaders said they plan to continue developing the course and related computer‑science options but did not specify staffing, enrollment caps, or funding sources on the broadcast.