A few good questions.

Each session starts with a live tutorial (about an hour) from someone doing interesting work with AI, whether that's an industry professional, a faculty member, or a fellow student. After the tutorial, the rest of the afternoon is open time to experiment with tools, work on projects, or just explore whatever you're curious about.

No. There's no fixed curriculum, no grades, and no learning progression you need to follow. AI Kitchen is an experimental space. What we work on each week is shaped by who shows up and what they're interested in.

AI literacy means understanding what AI tools can and can't do and how to use them responsibly. AI Kitchen builds on that foundation. Think of literacy as reading a recipe and fluency as knowing how to cook. Fluency comes with practice: you pick up a new tool without waiting for a tutorial, you work through it when the output is wrong, and you know when not to use AI at all. People get fluent in a language by using it with others, so AI Kitchen meets every Friday for hands-on work alongside other students, faculty, and industry mentors.

Not at all. We welcome students from every major. Some sessions will be more technical than others, but the goal is to make AI tools accessible to everyone. A lot of working with AI is really about thinking clearly, breaking problems into steps, and expressing what you want in plain language, not writing code.

Yes. You'll get exposure to tools and workflows you won't encounter in your coursework, work alongside students from other disciplines (which changes how you think about problems), and have the chance to build projects with real-world impact.

Whatever you actually do with AI in your work. That might be using AI for coding, writing, data analysis, design, research, or something else entirely. You don't need a polished talk or a textbook workflow. Showing students how you actually think through problems with AI tools is what's most valuable, including the parts where it doesn't work and you have to debug or iterate.

That's fine. Many of us are figuring this out as we go, and that's part of the point. If you're not ready to lead a tutorial, you're welcome to just drop in, help mentor students, and learn alongside everyone else.

No. Come when you can. Some people will be here every Friday, others will drop in once or twice. Both are great.

Think of AI Kitchen as a complementary creative studio or maker space for AI. It's open-access, no application needed, and welcomes students from every major. The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab is a research lab (by application only) focused on human-computer interaction. Prof. Kai Lukoff leads both, but AI Kitchen involves faculty from across departments.

AI Collaborate is an amazing and pioneering student organization at SCU. AI Kitchen has more direct faculty leadership, with student Studio Leads and a research focus. We plan to collaborate! In format, AI Kitchen is closer to the Imaginarium, another interdisciplinary initiative on campus focused on XR technologies that is also faculty-led with student leads.

SCU's Responsible AI initiative focuses on interdisciplinary research, ethical AI education, and curriculum development, addressing questions like how AI should be used in teaching and what policies should guide its adoption. AI Kitchen complements that work from the other direction: it is a hands-on creative studio and maker space where students and faculty build with AI tools, learning what they can and cannot do through direct experience. We believe getting your hands dirty with the technology is one of the best ways to develop informed, critical perspectives on its implications.

We put together an AI Tools Guide for SCU Students with our top picks across 10 categories, from general-purpose AI assistants to code generation, design, research, and more. Every tool on the list is free or offers premium access for students. Start with Claude for its strong model quality and approachable app, and use Google Gemini for work inside Google Workspace since it is free through your SCU account.

Programming has always been moving closer to how humans actually think and communicate. Early computers required instructions written in raw numbers. Over the decades, programming languages became more readable and expressive, from lower-level languages closer to the machine to higher-level languages like Python that read almost like natural language. Generative AI is the latest leap: today, you can build working software by describing what you want in plain English. Our thesis is that this shift will allow a much wider range of people to participate in creating software and digital experiences, bringing their own domain expertise to problems that technology alone can't solve.

That said, understanding what's happening further down the stack can be very helpful and sometimes essential. It depends on the context. For early-stage prototyping, the emphasis is on speed and exploration, and natural-language tools can get you remarkably far. For something like a hospital application, where privacy, security, and reliability are paramount, more robust and careful engineering is required.

That's exactly why AI Kitchen brings together faculty and students from different disciplines, both technical and non-technical. A business student might prototype a workflow automation using AI, then partner with a CS student to harden it for production. A psychology student might design an intervention, then collaborate with engineers to build it reliably. The mix is the point.

It's deliberate. Research shows that framing shapes who shows up: when computer science spaces look and sound like stereotypical tech culture, women and underrepresented students opt out (Cheryan et al., 2009). A kitchen is familiar, communal, and creative. Everyone has some relationship to a kitchen, regardless of major or background. The name signals that this space isn't just for CS students.

Our visual identity is inspired by Design Buddies, the 200,000+ member design community founded by SCU alumna Grace Ling (BS '19, MS '21). Ling's approachable, kawaii-influenced branding helped build one of the largest and most inclusive design communities in the world. We're taking a similar approach: if the vibe is welcoming, the people will be too.

AI tools and workflows are evolving so fast that academia often struggles to keep pace. At the same time, one of the biggest barriers to leveraging AI for non-technical applications is simply knowing what's possible. AI Kitchen creates a space where industry practitioners share what's actually working in the field, faculty bring critical thinking and domain expertise, and students get hands-on exposure to both. Everyone benefits from this kind of knowledge exchange: students see real-world applications, professionals get fresh perspectives, and faculty stay connected to how these tools are being used in practice.