Setting the Scene¶
Expedition Readiness: A Problem Worth Solving
Every day, rangers and land managers across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem do something essential. They update park alerts when conditions shift: dangerous wildlife encounters, trail closures, flooding, fire, geologic hazards. The National Weather Service publishes detailed forecasts for the Yellowstone interior. USGS stream gauges report real-time river levels at key crossing points.
None of it is in one place.
A backcountry hiker planning a multi-day route in Yellowstone has to check the NPS website for current alerts, pull up the weather forecast, and look up stream gauge readings separately, often from a spotty connection at the trailhead. The information exists. It's authoritative. It's just scattered.
That's where you come in.
Your team is going to build an Expedition Safety Brief: an interactive planning resource for backcountry hikers heading into the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Active park alerts, weather forecast, river crossing conditions. Everything a hiker needs in one place, before they leave the trailhead.
You're building for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: 15 million acres coordinated across 11 federal agencies. Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks sit at the center, managed by the National Park Service. Six national forests surround them, managed by the Forest Service. The Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service handle the rest. The Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee (GYCC) exists because no single agency owns the whole picture; it brings all eleven together to manage the ecosystem as a unit. A hiker crossing from a national park into a national forest doesn't feel the jurisdiction line. Your brief shouldn't either.
How the Challenges Work¶
Your team will go through four challenges. Each challenge builds on the last. You never start over. Here's how they work:
- Your team of four builds one thing together. One field guide, one project, one demo at the end. How you organize (everyone on one screen, splitting into pairs, taking turns) is entirely up to you. Experimenting with how you work together is part of the learning.
- Each challenge builds on the last. What you create in Challenge 1 carries forward into Challenge 2, 3, and 4. You'll add real data, new features, and eventually deploy it live.
- Baseline capabilities and stretch goals. Every challenge has a set of baseline capabilities everyone should aim for, plus stretch goals for teams that get there and want to push further.
- The goal is learning, not finishing. Understanding what you built and why it works matters more than checking every box. Help your teammates. Talk through decisions. Celebrate the wins together.
The Most Important Thing¶
You're about to use AI to build something real. Here's the one thing that will make the biggest difference in what you learn today:
Build one piece at a time.
The temptation will be to write out everything you want in one massive prompt and let AI handle it all at once. Don't. That's not how you learn this skill.
If you paste a wall of requirements and accept whatever comes back, you'll have output, but you won't understand it. You won't know what worked, what didn't, or how to fix it. You won't develop the judgment for when AI nails it and when it needs a nudge. And that judgment is the whole point.
The value is in the back-and-forth. Write a user story. Send it. Look at what comes back. Does it match your acceptance criteria? If not, tell your AI tool exactly what to change. That cycle (prompt, evaluate, refine) is the skill that transfers to everything you'll do with AI after today.
Build incrementally. Verify as you go. Discuss as a team.