Course Schedule - Spring 2026

Key Dates

• Classes Begin: January 12, 2026
• MLK Day (no class): January 19, 2026
• Spring Break: March 14-21, 2026
• Classes End: April 22, 2026
• Finals: April 25 - May 1, 2026

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Assignments

Assignment	Due Date	Points	Description
HiPerGator Training	Jan 23, 8:30 AM	5	Complete UF RC training
Assignment 0	Jan 28, 11:59 PM	50	Python, GitHub, LLM basics

More assignments will be released as the semester progresses.

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Weekly Schedule

Week 1: Course Introduction (Jan 12, 14, 16)

Day	Topic	Activity
Mon	Course Introduction	Syllabus, expectations
Wed	Git/GitHub Crash Course	Live demo
Fri	Topics Overview	Data engineering + LLMs

Assigned: Assignment 0

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Week 2: MCP & Data Extraction (Jan 21, 23)

Monday Jan 19 - MLK Day, no class

Day	Topic	Activity
Wed	MCP Fundamentals	Architecture, primitives
Fri	HiPerGator Setup	Matt Gitzendanner guest talk

Due: Assignment 0 (Jan 28), HiPerGator Training (Jan 23) Assigned: Assignment 1.5

Readings: MCP Specification, MCP Quickstart Guide (see lecture readings)

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Week 3: Prompt Engineering (Jan 27, 29, 31)

Day	Topic	Activity
Mon	Prompting Fundamentals	Zero-shot, few-shot, prompt structure
Wed	Chain-of-Thought	CoT theory, Zero-shot CoT, Tree/Graph of Thoughts
Fri	Reading Papers + Structured Outputs	3-pass method, JSON mode

Due: Assignment 0 (Jan 28) Assigned: Assignment 1, Assignment 2

Readings: Chain-of-Thought Prompting, How to Read a Paper (see lecture readings)

Tools: Navigator CLI - Command-line tool for querying NavigatorAI

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More weeks will be revealed as the semester progresses.

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