​Hands-On GenAI — Build Your First AI App

​In this enablement session, build an AI application grounded in real documents. Participants will create a knowledge base from course materials, build a chatbot that answers questions and cites its sources, and configure responsible AI guardrails. The session concludes with track-specific building time.

​What participants will experience:

• ​Introduction to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

• ​Upload documents, create a knowledge base, and ask questions against it

• ​Build a chatbot that answers from your documents and cites sources

• ​Configure AI safety guardrails (content filters, denied topics)

• ​Track breakout: start building your hackathon prototype

​After this session, participants will be able to:

• ​Build AI applications grounded in real-world documents

• ​Implement responsible AI safeguards

• ​Architect an application pattern suitable for their hackathon project

​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 third 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.