DESIGNING LESSON PLANS
Prompt Engineering
A practical hour for CollegeNow technology teachers
David Green · Associate Professor, Computer Information Systems · Tompkins Cortland Community College
ONE COMPANY. ONE MONTH.
60,000,000,000,000
tokens of AI, consumed by the employees of one company in a single 30-day stretch.
THE STAKES
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WHAT THEY BUILT
“Claudeonomics”
An engineer built it on the company intranet — a live leaderboard ranking all 85,000 employees by how much AI they used.
Titles awarded: “Token Legend” · “Cache Wizard” · “Session Immortal”
Top user: 281 billion tokens in 30 days. People competed for it.
Not in the top 250: Mark Zuckerberg.
At Meta, “did they use AI?” isn’t a question. Everyone did — loudly, competitively, as a status symbol.
THE STAKES
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TWO DAYS LATER
Meta killed the leaderboard.
“All motion is not progress. Token usage alone is not a measure of impact of any kind.”
— Andrew Bosworth, Meta CTO
Plenty of those tokens were garbage — agents left running for hours to pad the score. Using AI and using it well are different things — and the second one is teachable. It’s called prompt engineering.
THE STAKES
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Where we're going
1
The stakes
2
The design
3
Build it
4
Take it home
THE ERA OF IMPLIED AI USE
The question is no longer whether someone used AI — only whether they used it well.
Not just Meta: Shopify’s CEO calls “reflexive AI usage” a baseline expectation, now built into performance reviews (Lütke memo, April 2025).
ROADMAP
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The design step
Tell the AI who it's writing for,
what the constraints are,
and how you'll measure the output.
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Demo: three prompts, one task
The task
Get the AI to write a short explanation of how public key encryption works.
What we'll do
Level 1 — Vague, no audience, no constraint. We'll see what comes back.
Level 2 — Audience and constraint added. Output tightens.
Level 3 — Explicit evaluation criteria. Now we can actually grade it.
DEMO
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THE PROMPT
Level 1
DEMO
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Explain public key encryption.
WHAT CAME BACK · 271 WORDS
“Public Key encryption uses a pair of keys: a public key shared openly, and a private key kept secret…” Then, unprompted: digital signatures, RSA, ECC, Diffie-Hellman, HTTPS, and cryptocurrency.
THE PROBLEM
Accurate — but there’s nothing here to measure. No audience, no limit, no criteria: you can judge it, but you can’t count anything. The standard lived only in your head.
THE PROMPT
Level 2
DEMO
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Explain Public key encryption to a high school junior in an intro cybersecurity course. Keep it under 200 words. Use one concrete analogy.
WHAT CAME BACK · 198 WORDS · ONE ANALOGY, ON LEVEL
“Think of it like a mailbox on your porch. Anyone can drop a letter through the slot — that’s your public key. But only you have the key that opens it to take letters out — that’s your private key.”
THE PROBLEM
Better — audience and length are now set and countable. But ‘explain it well’ still isn’t measurable. Did it cover WHY two keys? You’d still have to judge that by hand.
THE PROMPT
Level 3
DEMO
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Explain Public key encryption to a high school junior in an intro cybersecurity course. Keep it under 200 words. Use one concrete analogy. The explanation should make clear (1) why two different keys are needed, (2) which key is shared and which is kept private, and (3) what problem this solves that a shared password doesn't. Do not use the word “mathematical.”
WHAT CAME BACK · 191 WORDS
✓ all three elements present and flagged ✓ under 200 words ✓ one analogy, sustained ✓ “mathematical” never appears
Every requirement is now measurable: three elements present or not, word count, one analogy, the banned word. You’re counting, not judging.
WHAT A STUDENT DOES WITH A LEVEL 3 OUTPUT
She reads the Level 3 explanation. The reply you're listening for sounds like this:
“So it’s really important to keep that private key safe and secure — so cybersecurity should look for ways to make that happen.”
WHY THIS IS THE POINT
She reasoned past the explanation to the system’s real weak point — key protection, which is exactly where professional cybersecurity lives. A measurable prompt gives a student an answer solid enough to push against.
DEMO
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The lesson plan template — fits one class period
1
Learning objective
What should students know or be able to do?
2
Prompt activity
What's the task? Specify audience, constraint, evaluation criteria.
3
Student artifact
What do they turn in? Prompt + output + a short revision note.
4
Quick assessment
How do you grade it quickly and easily?
TEMPLATE
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Worked example · Networking concepts
OBJECTIVE
Students will turn a good prompt into a measurable one for a networking concept.
ACTIVITY
Pick one concept from this week's reading (TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, NAT). Write a Level 2 prompt — audience and constraint only — and run it. Then design a Level 3: add three criteria a good answer must include, plus one exclusion (e.g. “no em dashes”). Run it again.
ARTIFACT
Both prompts, both outputs, and 2–3 sentences on what the criteria added — and how you'd now measure the Level 3 output.
ASSESSMENT
Does the Level 3 add measurable criteria the Level 2 lacked? Can you now count whether the output meets them? Does the note show what improved and why?
TEMPLATE
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Your turn
10
minutes
BUILD
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Likely questions
Q. How do I stop students from just using AI to do everything?
The artifact is the thinking about the prompt, not the output. A student who didn't engage produces a v2 that's no better than v1.
Q. What if my district doesn't allow students to use AI?
Run the same activity as a critique exercise. You provide the prompt and output; students evaluate them. No student AI use required.
Q. Which tool should students use?
Whatever your district allows. The move transfers across Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot.
Q & A
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KEY TAKEAWAY
Prompt engineering is designing the prompt so
the output you need is what comes back.