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LLMs Unplugged

Product or Programme · All products and programmes
Evidence · 1 claim (1 for) · 1 study (1 design), q2 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 1 claim rests on one study

Description

A freely available CC BY-NC-SA collection of unplugged lessons, instructor notes, printable handouts, and optional n-gram booklet software tools created and hosted by Ben Swift for teaching language-model fundamentals and AI literacy.

Components

  • LLMs Unplugged open resource suite: lessons, instructor notes, and n-gram booklet software tools at www.llmsunplugged.org: LLMs Unplugged is a freely available (CC BY-NC-SA) collection of unplugged activities for teaching language-model fundamentals, hosted at www.llmsunplugged.org. Its core mechanic has students build n-gram models by hand from children's books, tallying which words follow which, then generate text via weighted dice rolls. The site has three components: lessons with printable handouts, instructor notes that “explain the connection between the activity and modern LLMs,” and an optional MIT-licensed Rust/Typst software tool that tokenises any input text and produces formatted n-gram booklets for domain-relevant pre-training. (Ben Swift (2026))
  • Modular unplugged lesson progression: two ordered Fundamentals lessons (Training, Generation) plus selectable Extensions covering scaling, output control, context and meaning, and model tuning: The LLMs Unplugged curriculum is organised into Fundamentals, which build on each other and “form the core of anyLLMs Unpluggedworkshop,” and Extensions that can be done in any order afterwards. Each Fundamentals lesson stands alone in a short session with minimal materials, and Extensions each explore one aspect of modern language models: pre-trained generation and trigrams (scaling), sampling and beam search (controlling output), context columns and word embeddings (context and meaning), and LoRA, RLHF and synthetic data (model tuning). A website toggle switches the Fundamentals between grid and bucket variants for different learners. (Ben Swift (2026))

Claims

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Key Sources

  • Ben Swift. (2026). LLMs Unplugged: Teaching Resources for a ChatGPT World. 28th Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE 2026). https://doi.org/10.1145/3786228.3786237
Page metadata
Field Value
type product
id llms-unplugged
title LLMs Unplugged
description A freely available CC BY-NC-SA collection of unplugged lessons, instructor notes, printable handouts, and optional n-gram booklet software tools created and hosted by Ben Swift for teaching language-model fundamentals and AI literacy.
status review
product_kind curriculum
generated by process:settle-candidates on 2026-10-12
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content

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