Prompt Engineering Guide for High School Students - Pioneers of the Seventeenth Century

As an educator with over 20 years of classroom experience, I'm excited to offer this comprehensive guide to help teachers introduce the crucial skill of prompt engineering to students. Prompt engineering involves crafting detailed, specific prompts to direct chatbots like ChatGPT to generate customized, high-quality outputs. Over the past six months, I've created over a thousand prompts myself, refining the process of prompting to optimize chatbot responses. This guide contains six types of potential chatbot outputs for students to explore: poems, stories, conversations, essays, descriptions, and lists of facts. For each output, I've included examples based on fascinating figures from 17th century history, such as astronomer Galileo Galilei, philosopher Rene Descartes, and poet Anne Bradstreet. By exposing students to a diverse range of historical individuals, they gain insights into the importance of tailoring prompts. For instance, a prompt for Galileo might involve his astronomical discoveries, while one for Descartes would highlight his philosophical introspections. The specificity is key. I walk teachers through crafting prompts using elements like genre, additional characters, actions, settings, timing, problems that arise, tones, and length. This methodical approach allows students to incrementally add complexity to their prompts, witnessing firsthand how each component shapes the final product. My hope is that by engaging students in this highly customizable prompt engineering process, they will grasp the direct relationship between prompt quality and AI output. This foundational skill, once instilled, will equip them to thrive in a future undoubtedly intertwined with AI. I'm thrilled to offer my expertise to fellow educators seeking to augment their instruction with this forward-thinking skill. Together, we can empower students to direct technology optimally by mastering the art of prompt engineering.