Teaching the Fundamentals

Welcome to the I2 Labs Intro to Neuro/AI guide. This guide will walk you through not only the materials, syllabus, and course structure but also the leadership and community building skills to hold a successful course. Let’s do it.

The first thing you need to do is find your audience. To do so, you can contact not only the existing members of your team but also your university’s surrounding community. At UW, we created an application based system, with the intent of accepting as many applicants as we could manage to teach, but we found that the application more clearly communicates member expectations.

Copy this template application and fill in your own team’s information
- Replace all <> info.
Send out the form to your Discord
Send out the form on neuroscience and CS email servers and forums
Collaborate with other similar organizations at your university to advertise the application

When you have completed this, you’re well on your way to having a great crop of members! Now we have to teach you how to teach.

Fork the course Github here from your organizations Github account, not a personal one: https://github.com/interactive-intelligence/intro-neuro-ai
Recruit 2 TA’s from your organization members to help you run the course, answer questions, and teach

Here you will find two important documents. The first is Schedule.md, which outlines weekly assignments and is the place to begin to find links to everything you will need to run and partake in the course. The second is called I2 Megadoc v0.1b.pdf. This document is heavily referenced by schedule.md for assignments each week and contains lots of great knowledge and exercises. Feel free to browse and explore!

Now you need to get ready for your first meeting with your newly recruited class. Feel free to take inspiration from the template of slides linked below.

Send emails accepting the applicants to your group (hint: create a spreadsheet from the responses to the Google Form and copy and paste the emails column into the bcc field of an email)
- Emphasize attendance at the first meeting!
Create the first meeting’s slides

Alright – you’ve planned the first meeting, you have the course content, you have a network of support, and you have an audience. You have everything you need. The rest is up to you, but don’t forget that there is a community here to help you teach as well – I2 Labs! Feel free to ask questions on the Discord or reach out to the other teams on I2 Labs.