Prompt Engineering Assignment

Day 1 Assignment — Your Real-World Prompt Challenge

The task

Choose one real-world task you have this week — at work, at home, or in your business. Use the AI tool of your choice to complete it using the CO-STAR framework. The task must be genuinely real and relevant to your life today.

Step-by-step instructions

1. Choose your task — something genuinely useful right now (a difficult email, a presentation, a business proposal, a social media post, a report).
2. Write your CO-STAR prompt using at least 4 of the 6 elements. Label each part: C, O, S, T, A, R.
3. Run the prompt in your AI tool and review the output — note what worked and what could be better.
4. Iterate at least once — give the AI one follow-up instruction to improve the result.
5. Ask the AI to "make it 20% shorter" and observe what changes and what the AI prioritises.

What to submit

• Your original CO-STAR prompt, with each element labelled
• The AI's first response (full text)
• Your follow-up iteration instruction
• The final improved response
• One sentence on what you learned from the exercise

Reflection questions

• How did the quality of the AI's output change when you added more detail to your prompt?
• What part of CO-STAR did you find most useful or most challenging?
• Name one task you do regularly that you could now do faster using AI.