Building Python Apps with Claude: AI-Assisted Programming

This 12-week course teaches students with limited programming background to build a working Python application by directing Claude as their programming partner. Each student brings their own app idea. Every week introduces one Claude capability, which students immediately apply to their project. The capabilities covered are chat and Projects, artifacts, Claude Code in VS Code, plan mode, project memory, checkpoints and recovery, debugging, custom commands and skills, subagents, connectors, and automation. Short Python literacy segments each week teach students to read the code Claude writes, so they can follow it, question it, and steer it.

Each class pairs a short concept lesson with a hands-on build lab. By the end of the course, every student will demo a working app built around their own idea and reflect on how they planned, guided, checked, and corrected Claude along the way. The goal is not to turn students into programmers overnight. It is to make them capable directors of AI-assisted software work.