A professor found me on LinkedIn and invited me to run a full-day workshop on AI agents at her college.
I said yes immediately.
What followed was one of the most energizing days I've had in a long time. One I'll genuinely remember for a while.
The Setup
Jerusalem College of Engineering. 60 AI/ML students. 9am to 3:30pm, a full day with two short breaks and a lunch in between.
The topic: AI Demystified: Understanding, Building & Deploying AI Agents.
My goal was simple. By the end of the day, I wanted every student in that room to go from "I know the textbook definition" to "I just built something that actually works."
That gap between knowing about a thing and actually building it is very real. It's also completely closeable. That's what the day was about.
How the Day Was Structured
I didn't want to just lecture at them. So I built a custom starter kit specifically for this workshop, a scaffolded project where the boring groundwork (folder structure, config, wiring) was already done. Students would build on top of it.
The idea was to start simple, layer complexity, and never let anyone feel lost.
Here's what we covered:
- What AI agents actually are. Not the sci-fi version. The real one. How tools, LLMs, and memory come together to make something that does things, not just answers questions.
- Building individual tools. Small, focused functions. Web search, data retrieval, calculations. The fundamental building blocks.
- Making those tools work together. Routing, orchestration, tool selection logic. Teaching the agent when to use what.
- A strict RAG app. Retrieval-augmented generation using Pinecone as the vector store and Tavily for search. Data-grounded answers, no hallucinations.
- N8N showcase. I closed the day by showing what's possible when you take these concepts and wrap them in a workflow builder. Eyes went wide. That was the point.
Stack: Python, Streamlit, OpenAI, Groq, Pinecone, Tavily.
The Energy in the Room
You can tell when a room is genuinely interested. This room was.
The moment students started seeing real outputs from code they wrote, the energy just shifted. People leaned in, conversations got louder, and students who got things running early started helping the ones next to them. That kind of peer learning is completely unplanned and always ends up being the best part.
I closed the session by sending every student the full complete codebase. Not just the starter kit. Everything, wired up and ready to run. The idea was simple: go home, open it, change one thing, see what happens, keep going. Because that's how it actually clicks.
What I Walked Away With
The college presented me with a shield engraved with the JCE name, along with a formal letter of appreciation. But what really got me was a separate token from my professor, a beautiful glass award that read:
"Your hard work and dedication are truly appreciated. Thank you."
I genuinely wasn't expecting that. It meant a lot.
We also got a bunch of photos taken throughout the day. I posted some of them on LinkedIn if you want to see the room in action.
Standing in Front of a Room, Not as a Student
Here's the thing. The professor who invited me wasn't just any professor. She was my professor. From my college, Peri Institute of Technology. Someone I sat in a classroom listening to, not that long ago.
That full-circle moment hit me harder than I expected.
And then the students started calling me sir. The faculty too.
I won't lie, it made me a little embarrassed. Inside I still felt like a student. I still am in so many ways, curious, figuring things out, Googling things I probably should already know. But there I was, standing at the front of the room, being treated like someone who had it all together.
Maybe that's the point though. You don't need to have all the answers to be worth listening to. You just need to be a few steps ahead and willing to share the map.
If I managed to give even a small spark to the student who didn't know where to start, then the whole day was worth it.
Here's to Many More
This was just the beginning and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
If you're a student who attended, you have the code. Use it, build on it, make it yours.
And if you're someone who wants to run a similar session at your college or community, reach out. Let's make it happen.
This is exactly what I want to keep doing.
— Cheers, NP