Audience: instructors, department chairs, curriculum directors, district AI coordinators, corporate L&D leads. Goal: make the syllabus drop-in adoptable in one planning session.
Pick the row that matches your calendar. All three deliver the same 12 quests and the same capstone.
| Format | Per-week load | Total contact hrs | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Semester (default) — 12 wks + Festival + Capstone | 3–4 hrs | ~50 | Undergrad, grad seminar |
| Half-load (24 wks) — one quest every two weeks | 1.5–2 hrs | ~50 | High school year-long elective |
| Bootcamp (6 wks) — two quests per week, paired by Part | 6–8 hrs | ~45 | Summer intensive, corporate L&D, faculty PD cohort |
| Quarter (10 wks) — collapse Wks 5+6 and Wks 11+12 | 3–4 hrs | ~40 | Quarter-system colleges |
| Micro-credential (4 wks) — one Part per week, learner picks one quest per Part | 3 hrs | ~12 | Open-enrollment continuing ed; certificate stack |
Pairing rules for the Bootcamp:
Non-exhaustive — designed to give you defensible language for accreditation reports.
| ISTE | Where it shows up in the syllabus |
|---|---|
| 1 Empowered Learner | Capstone portfolio (student-controlled hosting); Thirteenth Quest |
| 2 Digital Citizen | Every weekly provenance plate; Week 8 Treaty; Week 10 Information Diet |
| 3 Knowledge Constructor | Weeks 1, 2, 5, 10 (data + source triangulation against AI) |
| 4 Innovative Designer | Weeks 3, 6, 9, 12 (designing with constraints, sunsets, durability) |
| 5 Computational Thinker | Weeks 2, 5, 11 (modeling, residuals, failure modes) |
| 6 Creative Communicator | Weeks 3, 4, 7 (myth, translation, witnessing) |
| 7 Global Collaborator | Week 4 (cross-language); Week 9 (off-world polity); Festival |
| VALUE rubric | Quest evidence |
|---|---|
| Critical Thinking | Council reviews, Week 5 residuals, Week 1 ledger |
| Ethical Reasoning | Every provenance plate; Week 8 Treaty; Week 7 Mirror |
| Information Literacy | Week 10 Information-as-Salt; Week 4 Translator |
| Integrative Learning | Capstone Recursive Reflection + Thirteenth Quest |
| Civic Engagement | Week 1 Field Test; Week 9 Charter; Week 11 Collapse Drill |
| Inquiry & Analysis | Week 5; Week 6; Week 2 supply-chain interview |
| Creative Thinking | Week 3; Week 6; Week 12; Festival |
| Written Communication | All weekly reflections; capstone defense memo |
| Oral Communication | Capstone defense; Festival booth |
| Intercultural Knowledge | Week 4; Week 9; Week 3 canon audit |
| NGSS CCC | Quest |
|---|---|
| Systems & system models | Wk 2 Economy as Forest, Wk 6 Living Prompt |
| Cause & effect | Wk 1 Honest Ledger, Wk 11 Collapse Drill |
| Patterns | Wk 5 Listening to Noise |
| Stability & change | Wk 12 Designing Permanence |
Both frameworks emphasize responsible use, human oversight, transparency, and inclusion. The course’s Guide for AI & Humanity Rubric (5 axes: Consent, Locality, Provenance, Reversibility, Honesty) is a direct operationalization of these principles. Map it line-by-line during your local approval process.
Category Weight Items
─────────────────────────────────────────────────
Weekly Quest Artifacts 36% 12 × 3%
Weekly Reflections 12% 12 × 1%
Council Participation 12% 12 × 1%
Thirteenth Quest Design Memo 10% 1
Capstone Portfolio 20% 1
Capstone Defense 10% 1
─────────────────────────────────────────────────
Total 100%
plate:
artifact: "Origin Myth of the Missing Sock"
week: 3
human_authors: ["Student Name"]
ai_co_authors:
- model: "<vendor / model / version>"
role: "draft continuations, canon audit"
session_date: "2026-09-17"
data_sources: []
canons_drawn_from: ["Norse", "Yoruba (public folklore)"]
canons_excluded: ["sacred Lakota stories — closed tradition"]
veto_channel: "instructor + 2 peers"
sunset_date: "2027-06-01"
signature: "Student Name, 2026-09-17"
Grading the plate is part of grading the artifact. A missing or false plate is the failure mode, not AI use itself.
Axis 0 1 2 3
Consent _____ _____ _____ _____
Locality _____ _____ _____ _____
Provenance _____ _____ _____ _____
Reversibility _____ _____ _____ _____
Honesty _____ _____ _____ _____
Reviewer: Artifact: Date:
One specific compliment:
One specific concern:
One concrete next step:
Three reviewers per artifact. Median wins.
| Need | Free option | Paid alternative | Analog parallel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chat-LLM | any modern free-tier chat assistant | paid-tier same | paper + classroom shared session |
| Versioning | Git + GitHub Pages | GitHub Pro | bound paper portfolio |
| Diagramming | Mermaid in Markdown | Figma | pencil & graph paper |
| Translation cross-check (Wk 4) | any free MT + native-speaker check | n/a | community language partner |
| Local AI for Wk 7 (privacy) | open-weights model on a school laptop | n/a | journaling without AI; reflect on the difference |
No student is required to create an account on any platform whose ToS conflicts with your district policy. A class-shared session run by the instructor is always an acceptable substitute.
“Won’t students just have the AI do everything?” The artifact is not the grade. The provenance plate, the Council review, and the reflection are the grade. A student who outsources cannot fake the plate without fabricating evidence — and fabricating evidence is the standard, well-understood violation we already know how to handle.
“Our AUP forbids AI use.” Then use the syllabus’s paper-and-pencil parallels for the co-creation step, and have students annotate publicly visible AI outputs from a teacher-controlled session. The questions, audits, and ethics framing remain unchanged.
“We don’t have AI tool budget.” Total dollar cost to adopt this syllabus is zero. All texts, prompts, expansions, rubrics, and tools have a free path.
“Our parents are worried about AI.” Send them the
pitch-to-curriculum-directors.mdand Week 7’s privacy footnote. The course’s posture is not “AI is exciting!” It is “AI is here; here is how we read it, audit it, and refuse it when necessary.”
“How do we assess hallucination?” Weeks 4, 5, and 6 require students to document where the AI was wrong. Errors are an assessment surface, not a failure.
“Is this ‘AI in the classroom’ or ‘classroom about AI’?” Both. By design. Students use AI in 11 of 12 quests, while studying its limits in all 12.
weekly-quest-cards.md for classroom walls.DaScient/prompt-atlas-ecl to be added to the adoption wall.Q. Can I sell my remix?
A. Per the repository license — adapt, translate, and use freely. Don’t repackage the canonical Atlas prose as your own; cite per atlas_respect.md.
Q. Can I substitute a chapter? A. Yes. Chapters 13–14 (Carnival, Wonder) are designed as substitution candidates — they can replace any earlier quest if your context calls for it.
Q. Does this work in a non-English-speaking program? A. The structure is language-agnostic. Week 4 (Translator’s Oath) becomes even richer in multilingual cohorts. We welcome translations as PRs.
Q. Is there a high-school version?
A. Yes — use the Half-load (24 wks) pacing and the paper-and-pencil parallel for Week 7. We’re collecting Grade 9–12 teacher remixes; tag your issue k12-remix.
Q. Does this work for corporate L&D? A. Yes — the Bootcamp pacing is designed for it. Replace the Capstone Portfolio’s “public hosting” requirement with “internal wiki” if needed.
Maintained by DaScient Press, Ltd. · Pull requests welcome.