// WSU Carson College of Business — Spring 2026
A two-week freshman crash course in prompt engineering. No coding required. Just clearer thinking.
// why this course
Prompt engineering is not a technical skill. It is a communication skill. The students who will thrive in the AI economy are not necessarily the ones who can code — they are the ones who can think clearly, communicate precisely, and iterate intelligently.
Vague questions get vague answers. This course teaches you how to tell AI exactly what you need — and why that matters more than which tool you use.
Your first prompt is never your best prompt. We treat revision as the core practice — not a sign of failure, but the actual method.
AI amplifies your thinking. If you do not have a clear thought to start with, AI cannot save you. This course sharpens the thinking that makes the prompting worth doing.
We address the hard questions directly: academic integrity, professional disclosure, and what it means to use AI responsibly in real work contexts.
// course schedule
Each 75-minute session follows the same structure: 20 min lecture, 35 min live lab, 20 min debrief. Every session produces something you can use.
// what you will learn
These are the prompting patterns that professionals actually use — taught through practice, not lecture.
Tell AI who it is before you ask it anything. Changes everything about the output.
Role, Task, Context, Format — the four elements of any effective prompt.
Provide examples to calibrate tone, style, and format without writing lengthy instructions.
Ask AI to show its reasoning. Catches errors before they reach your output.
Clarify, Refine, Instruct, Scope, Push — a five-step framework for systematic revision.
Tell AI what NOT to do. Constraints produce better output than instructions alone.
// assignments & grading
This course rewards iteration over perfection. A weak prompt that gets diagnosed and improved demonstrates more mastery than a polished result with no process shown.
20 minimum entries over two weeks. Log real prompts from your daily life — what worked, what didn't, and what you changed.
Take a bad prompt (provided), rebuild it using everything from Week 1, and explain every decision you made.
Use AI to analyze a topic, then verify two claims against real sources. Identify where AI was wrong.
Annotate 10 prompts from Week 1 — explain what worked, what failed, and why.
5 prompts for 5 real business scenarios from a provided list. Each includes the task, the final prompt, the output, and a reflection on your iteration process.
// tools
We use free tools throughout. The goal is not tool mastery — it is the judgment to use any tool well.
chat.openai.com — the most widely deployed AI assistant. Free tier is sufficient.
claude.ai — particularly strong at following complex instructions and nuanced editing tasks.
perplexity.ai — AI search with citations. Ideal for research tasks where sourcing matters.
notebooklm.google.com — upload your own documents and have AI reason over them.
The students who get the most out of this course are not the most technical. They are the most curious. The willingness to try something, see it fail, and immediately try again is the core skill — in prompt engineering and in your career.
— Course philosophy, The Art of the Prompt
// instructor
Chair, Department of Marketing and International Business — WSU Carson College of Business
Andrew Perkins is a marketing professor and the author of After the Grind: Rethinking Your Business Career in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. His research focuses on implicit attitudes, consumer behavior, and the intersection of AI and human decision-making. This course is built on the conviction that the most valuable professional skill in the next decade is not knowing how to use AI — it is knowing how to think alongside it.