​AWS AI Foundations — Amazon Bedrock

​In this enablement session, you will learn the core tools for building AI applications. Through hands-on exercises, participants will interact with foundation models, learn prompt engineering techniques, and build an interactive chatbot with a web interface. No prior AWS or coding experience required.

​What participants will experience :

• ​Introduction to generative AI and Amazon Bedrock

• ​Send prompts to AI models and observe how different instructions change the output

• ​Connect an AI model to external data using function calling

• ​Build a multi-turn chatbot with a Streamlit web interface

• ​Track breakout: apply text generation to your challenge track (Teach, Learn, or Collaborate)

​ After this session, participants will be able to:

• ​Call AI foundation models through the Bedrock API

• ​Write effective prompts and control model behavior

• ​Build a basic interactive AI application with a web front-end

​How It Connects to Hackathon Tracks

• ​Teach: Generate lesson plans, rubrics, and feedback grounded in curriculum standards

• ​Learn: Build AI tutors that answer from course materials and adapt to the student

• ​Collaborate: Create assistants that summarize group work and coordinate team projects

​Prerequisites: None. All tools and environments are provided. A laptop with a web browser is all that is needed. Attendance at Sep 3 is recommended before Sep 8 but not required.

​Workshop environment: Building with Amazon Bedrock

​This is the second of four enablement sessions ahead of the Minds & Machines Hackathon, which invites participants to create AI-powered solutions for teaching and learning to help shape the future of education and workforce development. With a focus on leveraging data science,  machine learning,  and AI, participants will create tools and models to tackle real-world issues in the classroom.