Symposium Workshops

This year, we are pleased to offer a variety of hands-on workshops from beginner to advanced and across an array of topics. Please review the workshop options below. If you would like to register for a workshop, please note that separate registration is required for each workshop on our registration platform.

All workshops are Free with Symposium Registration.

All workshops are In-Person Workshops. As a courtesy to others, please only register for workshops you can commit to attending in person.

Please note that online workshops, live demonstrations, and in-person workshops that do not require active participation or have capacity limits will be listed on our conference platform Guidebook with the full agenda.

Tuesday, November 10th Workshops

There are four (4) workshops on Tuesday, November 10th. All Tuesday, November 10th Workshops will begin at 1pm and end before 3pm and are 90-minutes to two hours long. Workshops are concurrent. Please only select ONE (1) Tuesday workshop. Pre-registration is required due to limited capacity; please register for the workshop you would like to attend on Tuesday on our registration platform.

Workshops A - Tuesday

A1 - Beginner Workshop 1: Upskilling Using AI: A Student Workshop

This workshop is designed by students for students. As AI workflows touch new sectors and jobs, it is important for everyone to know how to use AI well and what to use it for. Each workshop facilitator has had experience with AI in the workplace and will be offering advice for new users for LLM use to build skills and ways to maximize their company credits and free tools. Premium skills in the modern workforce are skills that allow you to discover connections, pivot quickly, and move into new areas. Even the least expensive models have the power to offer any worker a roadmap for new skills. This workshop focuses on how people can get the skills they need without all the snake oil. All participants will become more confident in their ability to use LLMs to discover fields or begin learning skills in an accessible and cost-effective way. Rather than chasing bootcamps or paid workshops, LLMs have a unique ability to navigate users through accessing the right plans for their work.

Materials needed: Computers are provided for this workshop, but participants may also bring their own laptops if desired.
Experience required: No AI experience required.

A2 - Advanced Workshop 1: Beyond the Prompt: Build your Own Co-Worker

Move beyond chatbots and build an AI agent that can use tools, follow specialized instructions, and interact with real-world services. In this hands-on, advanced workshop, participants will use the Pi coding agent harness to create a fully functional, extensible agent from the ground up. We will configure the agent, connect it to an AI model, and explore the building blocks that turn a general-purpose model into a capable system. You’ll create reusable agent skills that provide domain-specific knowledge and workflows, then add Model Context Protocol (MCP) support to connect the agent with external tools, services, and data sources. Along the way, we’ll examine context engineering, progressive disclosure, tool design, and practical debugging techniques. By the end of the workshop, you’ll leave with a working agent you can extend for your own projects—and a clearer understanding of what is happening underneath the increasingly crowded world of agent frameworks.

Materials needed: Participants will use the high-end computers in the AI Studio for this workshop but may also bring their own laptops if they wish.
Experience required: This workshop is designed for participants who have previous generative AI experience and are comfortable using generative AI platforms.

A3 – Responsible AI Infrastructure for Rural Communities: A Great Plains Working Session

AI is arriving in rural Great Plains communities from two directions at once. Large computing facilities are being sited near rural power, water, and land, and AI tools are being adopted across agriculture, manufacturing, utilities, and health systems. Both raise the same questions in different forms: who decides, on what evidence, who benefits, who bears the burdens, and which choices become hard to reverse.

This working session will bring together researchers, practitioners, and community and industry participants to build shared language for those questions across sectors that rarely sit at the same table. Participants will work a realistic composite case, a rural public utility evaluating a major computing load, through three analytical lenses: infrastructure (generation, transmission, water and cooling, land, broadband, data systems), governance (who will hold authority, information, ownership, and recourse), and applications (how AI will actually change production, services, work, and resource management). The session will use a social-environmental-technical systems framing, where the consequential questions will concentrate at the interfaces between dimensions rather than inside any one of them.

The session will be diagnostic. It will surface disagreement rather than resolve it and will treat terminology conflicts across sectors as findings rather than noise. Participants will leave with a concrete picture of what a well-informed regional decision would actually require, and every participant will receive the written synthesis of assumptions, contradictions, evidence gaps, and regional variation.

Materials needed: All materials will be provided for this workshop.
Experience required: No AI experience required. However, the workshop hosts encourage those working in utility, agriculture, manufacturing, health, and local government to join the conversation, as well as academics and community members.

Wednesday, November 11th Workshops

There are three (3) workshops on Wednesday, November 11th. All Wednesday, November 11th Workshops will begin at 1pm and are 90-minutes to two hours long. Workshops are concurrent. Please only select ONE (1) Wednesday workshop. Pre-registration is required due to limited capacity; please register for the workshop you would like to attend on Wednesday on our registration platform.

Workshops B - Wednesday

B1 - Beginner Workshop 3: From AI Concept to Physical Artefact – AI T-Shirt Design and Contest

Participants will be guided through the process of generating T-Shirt designs using Generative AI. After experimenting with various iterations, participants will select their favorite T-Shirt design and submit it for the AI T-Shirt Design Contest, to be featured on next year’s symposium T-Shirt! Additionally, during the workshop, T-shirt Designs will be printed in the Makerspace, and participants will be able to take home the T-Shirt they designed! Participants should then wear the T-Shirt they designed to the Award and Closing Ceremony of the Heartland AI Symposium where winners of the competition will be announced.

Materials needed: Participants will use the Media Studio computers and the Makerspace for this workshop. The Media Studio has software previously installed on their computers for participants to use for this workshop. All materials for printed T-Shirts will also be provided.
Experience required: No AI experience required.

B2 - Intermediate Workshop 1: The Wait for Pi is Over. How a Minimalistic Agent Can Adapt to your Workflows with Ice Cream on Top.

This session introduces attendees to Pi, an innovative AI companion application designed for flexible, agent-based workflows. Participants will learn how to install and configure Pi across Windows, macOS, and Linux, establishing it as a robust tool for both individual study and professional automation. We will explore its core capabilities—from acting as a personalized tutor to executing complex code—and demonstrate how to extend its reach using Model Context Protocol (MCP). The significance of this workshop lies in its focus on bridging the gap between conversational AI and actionable, tool-using agents. By mastering Pi’s local configuration and MCP extensions, attendees will gain practical skills to build customized workflows that solve real-world problems, moving beyond simple prompting into a new era of personalized, privacy-conscious AI integration.

Materials needed: Participants will need to bring their own laptop for this workshop.
Experience required: This workshop is designed for participants who have some previous generative AI experience.

B3 - Advanced Workshop 2: Build a RAG Retrieval Agent

Modern AI agents don't just chat, they call tools. In this hands-on workshop you'll build one of the most useful tools an agent can have: a retrieval server that lets it answer questions from your own documents using the open Model Context Protocol (MCP). Working on a public dataset with a free, open-source agent, you'll build a local retrieval tool from scratch, then watch the agent retrieve and answer on its own. Along the way we deliberately break it with wrong retrievals, confident hallucinations, the agent ignoring its own tool, and fix each, learning why it happened. Participants leave with a working, citation-backed tool that plugs into any agent and experienced builders get optional deep-dives into embeddings, evaluation, and guardrails for sensitive data.

Materials needed: Participants will need to bring their own laptop for this workshop.
Experience required: This workshop is designed for participants who have previous generative AI experience and are comfortable using generative AI platforms.

Thursday, November 12th Workshops

There are four (4) workshops on Thursday, November 12th.All Thursday, November 12th Workshops will begin at 1pm and are 90-minutes to two hours long. Workshops are concurrent. Please only select ONE (1) Thursday workshop. Pre-registration is required due to limited capacity; please register for the workshop you would like to attend on Thursday on our registration platform.

Workshops C - Thursday

C1 - Beginner Workshop 4: Building AI Literacy with LEGO

In this workshop, participants will use LEGO building to model how large language models are trained and how they generate outputs. The goal is to "de-mystify" the technology by helping participants develop a clear, conceptual understanding of how these systems work, thereby enabling more informed and critical decisions about their use. Without this understanding, users may either place too much trust in AI outputs or avoid the technology altogether. Grounded in Leo Lo's AI Literacy for All framework, this workshop emphasizes that understanding how large language models function is a foundational component of AI literacy. It also demonstrates how constructivist, play-based learning can make abstract processes more accessible, engaging, and meaningful for diverse audiences. Participants will work individually or in small groups to build robots out of LEGO and other provided materials during this workshop.

Materials needed: All materials will be provided for this workshop.
Experience required: No AI experience required.

C2 - Beginner Workshop 5: Learning by Teaching AI: An Embodied Approach to AI Literacy with Robot ReachyMini

Artificial intelligence is often positioned as a tutor, assistant, or source of entertainment. This workshop challenges that paradigm by exploring AI as a learner. Through a live demonstration of an embodied AI agent (a little robot named ReachyMini), participants will experience how students can teach AI through interaction, creativity, and play. The session introduces a pedagogical framework and curriculum that positions learners as active knowledge builders while developing AI literacy, computational thinking, and creative confidence. Participants will engage directly with the robot ReachyMini, discuss classroom applications, and examine how embodied AI can support constructivist and constructionist learning across K–12 and higher education. The significance of this workshop lies in offering an alternative vision for AI in education that shifts agency from intelligent machines to human learners, empowering students to shape, teach, and critically engage with AI rather than simply consume it.

Materials needed: All materials will be provided for this workshop.
Experience required: No AI experience required.

C3 - Beginner Workshop 6: AI hallucinations: What they are and how to spot them

Popular Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have been trained to give confident answers to nearly any question. Their aversion to hedging or admitting ignorance makes them more engaging but also leads them to make things up and ignore important nuance. Those errors are commonly called hallucinations. After a brief explanation about why and when they occur, participants will use this knowledge to identify potential inaccuracies in several AI-generated answers. We will then practice using prompting techniques and specialized tools to discover which claims are true and which are problematic.

Materials needed: Computers are provided for this workshop, but participants may also bring their own laptops if desired.
Experience required: No AI experience required.

C4 - Intermediate Workshop 2: From AI Concept to Physical Artefact – AI T-Shirt Design and Contest

Materials needed: Participants will use the Media Studio computers and the Makerspace for this workshop. The Media Studio has software previously installed on their computers for participants to use for this workshop. All materials for printed T-Shirts will also be provided.
Experience required: This workshop is designed for participants who have some previous generative AI experience.