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The Question
Most students who try to build with AI for the first time hit the same wall: the tool gives them something that looks impressive but doesn't actually do what they wanted. Discovery is built around the question of why that happens, and what changes when a student learns to think before they prompt. The premise is simple. AI is not a shortcut around understanding. It is a tool that rewards understanding, and exposes the absence of it.
What Students Build
Over three weeks, students build three small projects, each designed to teach a specific layer of how these tools actually work. A game show study app that reveals how AI handles context, instructions, structure, and iteration as students turn their own notes into something playable. A project that uses real-world inputs from their device, like location, camera, or audio, while teaching them to request only the permissions and features the app actually needs. A personal dashboard or interactive tool that pulls live data from the internet, stores it responsibly, and turns it into something genuinely useful.
By the end, students have shipped real things, debugged real failures, and developed a feel for what is actually happening when an AI tool gives them an answer.
The Mentor
Julio Bernard guides the engineering team building SeqHub's AI co-teacher, the technology that powers every program at the Academy. He is a software developer and educator who has spent his career making coding accessible, through A100, the program he ran to help aspiring developers build skills, confidence, and industry experience, and through years of teaching computer science to younger students. This summer he is leading Discovery, the entry point for students new to building with AI.
His goal is not to teach students to use AI quickly. It is to give them a developer's understanding of what AI actually is, and a developer's culture: collaborative, skeptical, and built on the conviction that no one builds anything meaningful alone.
Who This Is For
Discovery is for students in grades 7 through 12 who are new to building with AI, or who have used AI tools casually but never built anything with them. No prior programming experience is required. The students who do best are the ones who get curious about how things work, who like taking things apart, and who are willing to be wrong on the way to figuring something out. Students who want a finished product handed to them will not enjoy this.
Logistics
Three weeks. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 11:00 AM to 12:15 PM ET. Friday sessions run 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM ET to accommodate Demo Day. Cohorts of 6 to 8 students. $2,500. Apply by June 1, 2026 at 11:59 PM.
Discovery runs in three sessions during summer 2026:
Session 1: June 15 to July 3
Session 2: July 6 to July 24
Session 3: July 20 to August 7 (opens based on demand from sessions 1 and 2)
Beyond the live sessions, students work on their own, and they are not alone when they do. Discovery is supported by a 24/7 Slack channel and a team of scholars and practitioners at the Academy. Students also work alongside SeqHub's AI co-teacher, which helps them think through problems on off days without doing the work for them. Plan for 8 to 10 hours per week, with 4.5 hours in live sessions and the rest on independent work.