Prompting.School: A Design-Based Research Approach to Teaching AI Literacy Through Guided Prompt Engineering Practice

AI literacy cannot be acquired by listening. The paper describes how prompting.schule was developed over several design cycles and why guided prompting exercises achieve more than a list of rules.

The methodological frame is design-based research: the learning platform is not designed once and evaluated afterwards but developed in cycles of design, use and revision. What learners actually do — and where they get stuck — therefore feeds into the next version.

The substantive core is guided practice. Rather than explaining prompting rules, the platform sets concrete tasks, has learners send their own prompts to a language model, and makes the difference between an imprecise and a considered formulation visible in the learner’s own result. The paper situates this approach within the debate on AI literacy — and introduces the platform it produced: prompting.schule.

How to cite

Brünner, B., Jahic, I., & Ebner, M. (2026). Prompting.School: A Design-Based Research Approach to Teaching AI Literacy Through Guided Prompt Engineering Practice. In M. E. Auer, P. Toth (Eds.), Innovation via Collaborative Learning in Engineering Education. ICL 2025. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, Vol. 1848. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-20381-6_62

@inproceedings{brunner2026promptingschool,
  author    = {Brünner, B. and Jahic, I. and Ebner, M.},
  editor    = {Auer, M. E. and Toth, P.},
  title     = {{Prompting.School: A Design-Based Research Approach to Teaching AI Literacy Through Guided Prompt Engineering Practice}},
  booktitle = {Innovation via Collaborative Learning in Engineering Education. ICL 2025. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, Vol. 1848},
  publisher = {Springer},
  address   = {Cham},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.1007/978-3-032-20381-6_62}
}

Related services

prompting.schule

• AI for Teaching
• Future Learning

Learning platform for using AI effectively in your own work.

Learn more →

Participating partners

Institute of Human-Centred Computing

Within TU Graz

TU Graz’s Institute of Human-Centred Computing is FLAAIT’s closest partner in subject terms — from human-computer interaction through data science to science and technology studies.

Learn more →

← Back to publications