Ethical AI Prompt Engineering for Families
If your child uses AI tools for schoolwork, or will soon, this course helps you set the rules for that use with a working knowledge of how the tools behave. Students learn to write prompts that support their own thinking and to check what the tool returns before relying on it.
Most teens already use chatbots, and parents underestimate it
In a national survey of 1,458 U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 who live with their parents, conducted in September and October 2025, 64% of teens reported using AI chatbots and 54% reported using them for help with schoolwork (Pew Research Center, 2026). One in 10 teens reported doing all or most of their schoolwork with a chatbot’s help. Among the parents of those teens, 51% said their teen uses chatbots, and about three in 10 were not sure. The data are self-reported. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.3 percentage points, the study-level response rate was 45%, and the cumulative response rate was 1.2%.
How a student uses the tool affects learning. In a randomized field experiment with nearly 1,000 high school mathematics students, unrestricted access to a GPT-4 chatbot during practice sessions resulted in 17% lower scores on a later exam taken without AI, compared with students who never had access. A version designed to safeguard learning largely mitigated that loss (Bastani et al., 2025). The study covered one subject at one high school in Turkey, so it cannot establish the same effect for other subjects, ages, or tools.
This course teaches students to use AI tools in ways that keep their own reasoning at work, and it teaches parents how to supervise that use.
Two ways to take the course
Self-paced parent course
$249
Work through the material on your own schedule. Live office hours run for 90 days after you enroll, so questions that come up while you apply the material get answered.
Live online family program
$3,240 one student · $4,860 two siblings
For students ages 13 to 18, with parents trained alongside them, so the adult who supervises AI use at home has learned the same material the student has. Sessions run live online by teleconference, and families can join from anywhere in the country. The $249 parent course is credited in full toward the family program if you enroll within 30 days.
Who teaches it
Dr. Pedro Cevallos, Ed.D. (UCLA), has spent close to three decades in education, including curriculum leadership at Pearson and co-founding College Bridge. He teaches the course personally, and no sessions are outsourced.
Enroll
Email pedro@cevallos.org to enroll in either option.
Ask about enrollmentSources
Bastani, H., Bastani, O., Sungu, A., Ge, H., Kabakcı, Ö., & Mariman, R. (2025). Generative AI without guardrails can harm learning: Evidence from high school mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(26), e2422633122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2422633122
Pew Research Center. (2026, February 24). How teens use and view AI. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/02/24/how-teens-use-and-view-ai/