This lesson provides an opportunity to practice what you know about effective prompt-writing. You will plan an input for the AI tool of your choice using prompt engineering concepts, evaluate the output, and refine your prompt to improve your results.
Evaluate and revise prompts
In this activity, you’ll engineer prompts for common tasks that involve summarizing and editing text, as well as solving problems. First, practice evaluating outputs from an AI tool and revising prompts until you achieve the best possible results. As you’re discovering, this iterative process is an important part of effectively using AI tools for workplace tasks.
As you know, AI tools have some potential limitations, such as reproducing unfair biases, generating inaccurate or unreliable information, interfering with academic integrity, or creating privacy issues. Feel free to return to your responsibility checklist anytime to ensure you’re using AI tools responsibly. And remember: Human critical thinking skills are the best way to ensure that the output is accurate, useful, and responsible.
In this scenario, pretend you’re collaborating with other educators at your school about an after-school computer literacy program. Some of your colleagues recently began using AI tools to help them perform workplace tasks, including summarizing meeting notes, editing emails, and solving a problem related to resource management. However, your colleagues aren’t familiar with the key principles of effective prompt-writing. As a result, their prompts are not generating the desired outputs. They ask for your advice, and you offer to help them iterate on their prompts to get the best possible output.
First, evaluate the output from your colleagues’ prompts to address issues and identify areas for improvement. Then, revise their prompts using an iterative approach until the AI tool provides the desired output. The output may meet your needs on the first try, or it may take you multiple attempts. Either way, you’ll have an opportunity to review each of their prompts before you open your AI tool to input the refined prompts.
Your coworkers want to use AI to support different tasks they need to accomplish day-to-day. Yusef, the organizer responsible for managing this project at your school, needs to summarize their notes from a recent team meeting. In particular, he wants a summary of the action items and the teacher assigned to each item. Yusef wants to organize this information in a format that can be quickly reviewed by the other teachers. This is a recurring need and can be time-consuming, especially when the notes are long and involve numerous action items.
Yusef has created the following prompt:
Prompt:
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Summarize the following notes: Meeting Notes Funding update – $5,000 grant received – Still need $10,000 more to fund scheduled projects – Donation campaign is beginning in two weeks (emailing past donors) – Action item (Mandy): Send an email to request donations Educational outreach programs – Still need to complete preparations for upcoming course – 35 students registered for the course, but we only have 20 computers – Action item (Luise): Determine how to organize the upcoming course with limited computer resources Monthly spotlight – This month’s spotlight: Being a good digital citizen – Speaker canceled, need new speaker for event – Action item (Jessica): Contact partner organizations and arrange a speaker |
He asks for your help reviewing and refining the prompt.
Access Gemini:
You can use browser-based tools, such as Gemini or ChatGPT. This activity uses Gemini.
To access Gemini:
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Go to gemini.google.com.
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Sign in to your personal Google account.
Refer to the resource about how to Create a Google Account, if you don’t already have one. For further assistance signing into Gemini, please refer to Gemini Apps Help.
Note: Before you use Gemini, review the following information:
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You must be over 18 years old to use Gemini.
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Review the Gemini Apps Privacy Notice.
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Please don’t enter private or confidential information in your Gemini conversations or any data you wouldn’t want Google to use to improve its products, services, and machine learning technologies.
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Gemini is not available in certain countries and languages. For more details, refer to documentation about Where you can use the Gemini web app.
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Feedback from a wide range of experts and users helps Gemini improve every day. So when you try Gemini, you can provide feedback using the thumbs up or thumbs down button—with the option to further explain in a comment.
Run and review the output:
To provide your feedback, first run the original prompt, following the same steps you used in a previous lesson. Yusef’s goal was to summarize meeting notes in an organized format that focuses on action items for different team members. So, copy and paste his prompt into your AI tool, then review the following output:
Output:
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Here is a summary of the meeting notes: Funding: The team received a $5,000 grant but still needs $10,000 more. A donation campaign will start in two weeks. (Mandy will send an email to past donors.) Educational programs: Preparations for the upcoming course are not yet complete. There are more students registered (35) than available computers (20). Luise needs to determine how to organize the course with limited resources. Monthly spotlight: The focus is on “Being a good digital citizen.” The speaker canceled, and Jessica needs to find a replacement from partner organizations. |
Disclaimer: Results for illustrative purposes.
Evaluate the output
Next, evaluate the output applying the prompt engineering strategies you learned earlier. You’ll discover that the output for Yusef’s original prompt summarizes the meeting notes as a whole. The initial prompt instructs the AI tool to summarize the meeting notes, but it needs to specify what content the summary should target or provide context about the format of the output. So, in order to refine the output, consider what details could be added to the prompt in order to meet expectations and revise the prompt. For example:
Prompt:
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Summarize the action items in these meeting notes. Place them in a table with columns for the action item and for the person assigned to the action item: Meeting Notes Funding update – $5,000 grant received – Still need $10,000 more to fund scheduled projects – Donation campaign is beginning in two weeks (emailing past donors) – Action item (Mandy): Send an email to request donations Educational outreach programs – Still need to complete preparations for upcoming course – 35 students registered for the course, but we only have 20 computers – Action item (Luise): Determine how to organize the upcoming course with limited computer resources Monthly spotlight – This month’s spotlight: Being a good digital citizen – Speaker canceled, need new speaker for event – Action item (Jessica): Contact partner organizations and arrange a speaker |
It might take you a few tries to get the output you want! Explore different iterations of your prompt until you are satisfied with the result.
After hearing about how you helped Yusef, another colleague approaches you for some support. Luise, the student coordinator for the afterschool program, is organizing a computer literacy course that will meet two hours a week. Your school has a limited number of computers — there are only 20 available for 35 registered students. Luise is hoping to use genAI to help her brainstorm potential solutions for this problem, but she’s never used an AI tool before. She asks for your help writing and refining a prompt.
Draft a prompt based on Luise’s desired output: She’s hoping to generate some ideas for how to deal with the fact that there are currently only 20 computers available for 35 students. As you do, remember the five “parts” of prompt-writing.
Access Gemini and write your prompt in the prompt box. Think back to the checklist you used in the previous lesson to refine the prompt. Make sure that you’re providing enough context so that the tool understands the problem.
You can use browser-based tools, such as Gemini or ChatGPT. This activity uses Gemini.
To access Gemini:
-
Go to gemini.google.com.
-
Sign in to your personal Google account.
Refer to the resource about how to Create a Google Account, if you don’t already have one. For further assistance signing into Gemini, please refer to Gemini Apps Help.
Note: Before you use Gemini, review the following information:
-
You must be over 18 years old to use Gemini.
-
Review the Gemini Apps Privacy Notice.
-
Please don’t enter private or confidential information in your Gemini conversations or any data you wouldn’t want Google to use to improve its products, services, and machine learning technologies.
-
Gemini is not available in certain countries and languages. For more details, refer to documentation about Where you can use the Gemini web app.
-
Feedback from a wide range of experts and users helps Gemini improve every day. So when you try Gemini, you can provide feedback using the thumbs up or thumbs down button—with the option to further explain in a comment
Run and review the out
Here’s an example representing one possible way to complete the activity. Yours might have been different! What’s important is that you iterate on the initial prompt to get the most useful output for the specific task:
Prompt:
| Help us plan a computer literacy course for 35 students. |
Output:
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Planning a Computer Literacy Course for 35 Students Here’s a breakdown to help you plan a computer literacy course for 35 students: 1. Assess Student Needs:
2. Course Content:
3. Teaching Methods:
4. Course Delivery:
5. Assessment:
Additional Tips:
By following these steps and tailoring the content to your students’ needs, you can create a successful computer literacy course for your group of 35. |
Disclaimer: Results for illustrative purposes.
Iterate your prompt:
This output is insufficient for Luise’s task because it doesn’t address the problem of limited resources (35 students but only 20 computers). The prompt also lacked relevant context about the problem, did not offer clear suggestions, and did not state that the specific task is to provide solutions to this problem.
Therefore, consider how to revise the prompt. First, think back to the checklist you used in the previous lesson. Make sure that you’re providing enough context so that the tool understands the problem. Then, revise your prompt to provide more context, and input it into the prompt box again. Finally, review the new output and evaluate whether it meets Luise’s needs. If not, continue to iterate and refine the prompt until you’re confident in the output.
For instance, you might change your prompt to the following:
Revised prompt:
| We are teaching a computer literacy course that will meet two hours a week. There are 35 students registered, but we only have 20 computers in the classroom. Provide a bullet point list of 10 potential solutions for this challenge. |
Revised output:
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Disclaimer: Results for illustrative purposes.
This output is much more effective for Luise’s task because it helps solve the problem of limited resources. The additional context and information about the task provided in this revised prompt were very helpful and demonstrate the importance of iteration!
You have now used your prompt engineering skills to write, review, and refine prompts to generate more useful and responsible output. Following an iterative process of evaluating outputs and revising prompts will help you achieve the best possible results. The more familiar you become with prompt-engineering, the more effective your AI outputs will be!