From Understanding to Creation: A Prerequisite-Free AI Literacy Course with Technical Depth Across Majors

arXiv:2604.09634v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most AI literacy courses for non-technical undergraduates emphasize conceptual breadth over technical depth. This paper describes UNIV 182, a prerequisite-free course at George Mason University that teaches undergraduates across majors to understand, use, evaluate, and build AI systems. The course is organized around five mechanisms: (1) a unifying conceptual pipeline (problem definition, data, model selection, evaluation, reflection) traversed r