prompt-atlas-ecl

The Prompt Atlas — 12-Week Quest Syllabus

For curriculum directors, deans of innovation, learning designers, and bold high-school department heads. A free, open, twelve-week course that turns The Prompt Atlas — Kronos Edition into a questline for the recursive age of AI.


Course title	The Prompt Atlas: Twelve Quests for the Recursive Age
Length	12 weeks · 3–4 hrs / week (flexible: bootcamp, semester, micro-credential)
Audience	Upper-secondary (Grades 11–12), undergraduate, graduate seminar, professional development
Cost to adopt	$0. Free under the repository license (see LICENSE + atlas_respect.md)
Format	Markdown · printable · PDF-ready · LMS-importable
Companion text	`PROMPT_ATLAS.md` (Kronos Edition, 2026) — also free
Status	v1.0 · maintained alongside the Atlas

📥 Download & Use

Everything in this folder is plain Markdown — no paywall, no login, no email gate.

File	Use it for
`12-week-quest-syllabus.md`	The full syllabus — adopt as-is, or remix
`instructor-adoption-kit.md`	Pacing options, standards alignment, assessment matrices, FAQ
`weekly-quest-cards.md`	Twelve printable one-page Quest Cards — hand them out, pin them on classroom walls
`pitch-to-curriculum-directors.md`	A one-page memo you can forward to your dean, principal, or board

Convert to PDF or DOCX (one-liners)

# Combined PDF of the whole syllabus pack
pandoc README.md 12-week-quest-syllabus.md instructor-adoption-kit.md \
       weekly-quest-cards.md pitch-to-curriculum-directors.md \
       -o PromptAtlas-12Week-Syllabus.pdf --toc --pdf-engine=xelatex

# Editable DOCX for your district's template
pandoc 12-week-quest-syllabus.md -o PromptAtlas-12Week-Syllabus.docx

Import into your LMS

Canvas / Moodle / Blackboard / Brightspace: each week is a self-contained module — copy the Markdown into a page or convert with pandoc --to=html.
Notion / Coda / Confluence: paste directly; tables and headings preserve.
Google Classroom: each Quest Card prints to a single sheet — distribute weekly.
GitHub Classroom: fork this repo; each week already has a Try This block ready to be turned into an assignment.

🧭 What is a “quest”?

A quest is one week of structured exploration anchored in a single Atlas chapter. Every quest has the same six beats — students always know what to expect, while the content changes radically week to week:

Premise — a one-paragraph mythic framing of the week’s question.
Field Notes — the canonical reading from PROMPT_ATLAS.md + the chapter expansion.
Co-Creation — a hands-on AI exercise (the user’s example: Week 3 — co-write a myth with an AI).
Field Test — apply the result in a real or simulated public context.
Council — peer + ethics review using the Guide for AI & Humanity rubric.
Logbook — a portfolio artifact, signed and dated, with a provenance plate.

The full week-by-week breakdown lives in 12-week-quest-syllabus.md.

🎯 Why a curriculum director should care

AI literacy is no longer an elective. It is the new civics.

This course gives you a ready-made, free, open-licensed answer to four questions every accreditation review is now asking:

“How are you teaching responsible AI use?” — Every week ends with an explicit ethics council and a provenance plate.
“How are you preventing AI-assisted cheating?” — We don’t ban AI; we make it the co-author of record. Assessment is about authorship, judgment, and provenance — not output.
“How does this map to standards?” — See the alignment matrix in instructor-adoption-kit.md: ISTE Standards for Students, AAC&U VALUE rubrics, NGSS cross-cutting concepts, OECD AI Literacy Framework (draft).
“What does the capstone show employers / admissions?” — A public Atlas Portfolio: 12 signed quests + 1 capstone, hosted on the student’s own GitHub or domain. Portable. Verifiable. Theirs forever.

A two-page version of this argument lives in pitch-to-curriculum-directors.md — forward it to your dean.

🪶 Pedagogical lineage

This syllabus stands on three traditions:

Quest-based learning (Gee, Salen Tekinbaş) — turn a course into a structured adventure with a visible questline.
Carrier-bag pedagogy (Le Guin) — the course is a container for things students gather; it is not a hero’s-journey gauntlet.
The Atlas’s own “recursive” framing — every chapter returns to its themes. So does every week. Mastery is spiral, not linear.

🛡️ Accessibility, ethics, and academic integrity

Accessibility. Every quest is delivered in plain Markdown (screen-reader friendly), with alt text on diagrams and no required proprietary tools. A “low-tech” path is offered for every co-creation activity — pen, paper, and a single shared classroom AI session suffice.
Ethics. Every week explicitly invokes the Guide for AI & Humanity notes from the chapter expansion. Consent, attribution, sunset rules, and veto channels are graded, not optional.
Integrity. Students do not hide AI use — they document it on a provenance plate attached to each artifact. The plate is the assignment.
Data minimization. Suggested AI tools are listed with privacy notes; no student work is required to be uploaded to a third-party platform.

🤝 How to contribute / remix

This syllabus is part of DaScient/prompt-atlas-ecl and the broader DaScient/The-Prompt-Atlas project.

Fork it. Adapt for your district, college, or company L&D program.
Open an issue to share a remix, propose a new quest, or flag an ethics concern.
Pull-request improvements to the rubrics, alignment matrix, or accessibility notes.

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” — algoritmi, quoted in the Atlas front matter.

Maintained by DaScient Press, Ltd. · Released free, in perpetuity, for the leaders of the recursive age.

This site is open source. Improve this page.