Summer Workshop Series: Claude for Teaching, Course Development, and Research

Intended Audience: Faculty with no prior experience or limited experience with Claude, the Claude desktop app or Claude Cowork. Faculty who already use Claude Cowork or Claude Code regularly may wish to skip this session.

Day 1 will be an orientation to Claude's three interfaces: 1) the chat window most faculty already know, 2) Cowork (an interface that allows you to give Claude read and write access to files on your computer), and 3) Claude Code (a terminal-based tool that takes the abilities of Cowork even further).The majority of the session will be devoted to Cowork. We'll install the desktop app, tour the interface, work through the basics of prompting, and connect Cowork to a folder of course materials or research data so you leave with a working setup on your own machine. We’ll close with a brief explanation of how Cowork and Claude Code differ and a demonstration of what Claude Code and more advanced techniques can enable.

Intended Audience: Faculty who work regularly with the Claude desktop app but have little or no experience with Claude Code, command line tools or code editors. Faculty who are regular users of Claude Code or who are experienced programmers may wish to skip this session

Day 2 will be an on-ramp to Claude Code for faculty ready to move beyond Cowork into a more technical environment. We'll install Claude Code and VS Code, get set up on GitHub, and get comfortable with the built-in commands and settings.  We will assume that you have not yet set these tools up, and that you may never have worked in a code editor before.  We will help you (both during the session and in an additional 90 minutes of office hours) troubleshoot the many quirky steps of getting command line tools running on your own machine (though we will also have Bok computers available for you to use as well with all the tools preloaded).  You will learn how CLAUDE.md files and skills work in the Claude Code environment, how to manage context files in VS Code, and, of course, how and why you might want to write some code (even if you’ve never done it before!). We'll close with a preview of skills to set up Day 3.

Intended Audience: Faculty who are comfortable with their understanding of Claude Code but are looking for ideas about (and best practices for) what to build with it.

The capstone day. Using everything from the prior sessions — Cowork or Claude Code, a structured CLAUDE.md, skills, MCPs, and where appropriate multi-agent orchestration — we'll move from raw materials (course notes, lecture records, readings, research data) to outputs faculty can actually use:a revised syllabus with dates and policies updated for next year, problem banks based on your past problems, interactive visualizations that explain key course content or communicate your research. After Day 4, faculty will have a rough-but-real artifact in progress, anchored in their own material, and a gallery of more advanced outputs (interactive textbooks, graphical abstracts, scholarly publications, lab websites and scicomm) to choose from for follow-up sessions.