Welcome to Your Guided Project!

This is an intermediate project-based course which should take approximately 2 hours to finish. It is a guided project course.

Project Outcome

By the end of the project, the student should be able to apply advanced prompt engineering principles in a Python application in order to generate rich and dynamic custom content on any topic using OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The Instructor

The instructor is Rudi Hinds, a software engineer and full-stack developer. He will be taking the students through this Guided Project.

Guided Project Structure

This Guided Project is divided into 4 parts:

1. Project Overview: This introductory reading material.
2. Hands-on Project: The hands-on project that we will work on together.
3. Graded Quiz: The final assignment that you need to pass to finish the project successfully.
4. Learner Survey: Tell us what you thought about this guided project!

Learning Objectives

1. Recognize the effects of poorly designed prompts when generating custom content.
2. Utilize expertly designed prompts to be able to create a quiz based on any specific topic that represents the exact format, level grading, details, and exactly the style that we want to get out of that.
3. Put all the above together in a Python program that dynamically generates detailed custom content based on any topic and topic-related parameters.

What students doing this course will need:

1. Basic Python programming skills; functions, assignments, variables,
2. Some experience of working with APIs
3. Python, and Jupyter Notebooks installed.
4. You’ll also need the credit cards for tokens. The cost of the tokens for this particular project will not be high, under $1

Course Topics and Content

Install and Import libraries and Configure OpenAI API

In this section students learn how to configure the API in a Python script and set up billing for ChatGPT API access.

The user is requested to visit https://openai.com/blog/openai-api and Sign up for API access, if they have not done so previously.

Generate Response from GPT-3 using simple prompt

In this section, students learn how to formulate a simple, straightforward prompt asking GPT to generate a quiz.

Students then utilize the created prompt to generate a response using OpenAI’s GPT and analyse it.

Refine Prompt with Details & Instructions

In this section students learn how to develop a clearer, more detailed prompt using specific instructions and details.

To finish off this section, students will compare the output from the refined prompt to the previous basic prompt and note any differences in quality.

Practise Activity

In the practice activity, students will construct and refine a simple prompt for generating a short story using the instructions and details principles of prompt engineering.

Enhance with Examples and a Dynamic Function

In this task, students will be looking at enhancing their prompt by providing examples. And then students are going to go a little bit further and put all of their prompt into a dynamic function that’s going to be able to provide them a quiz on any topic.

Refine with Direct and Quantitative Principles

Students will then refine their prompt by being direct and quantitative with their instructions.

There is also the opportunity to experiment with dynamic prompts and different parameters in the API call.

Cumulative Activity

In the final Cumulative Activity, students will create a Python application that uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT API to generate compelling product descriptions for an eCommerce website.

Final Thoughts

This course is useful and beneficial. Specifically, the final Cumulative Activity will detail some important aspects of prompt engineering that students will find extremely useful as they go on to build further projects:

1. The application students learn to program will dynamically generate a prompt based on the user supplied information, such as names, keywords, category, features, etc.
2. Students will have learnt how to incorporate effective prompt engineering principles such as providing clear instructions, detailed specifications, and appropriate examples.
3. Students will develop skills to review the output of their applications and ensures it provides a unique, engaging description that effectively highlight’s the product’s features, and appeals to potential customers.