# Getting Started with this Curricula

## Are you a student?

Get started with the following resources:

* [Student Hub page](https://docs.microsoft.com/learn/student-hub?WT.mc_id=academic-77998-cacaste) On this page, you will find beginner resources, Student packs, and even ways to get a free cert voucher. This is one page you want to bookmark and check from time to time as we switch out content at least monthly.
* [Microsoft Student Learn ambassadors](https://studentambassadors.microsoft.com?WT.mc_id=academic-77998-cacaste) Join a global community of student ambassadors, this could be your way into Microsoft.

**Students**, there are a couple of ways to use the curriculum. First of all, you can just read the text and look through the code directly on GitHub. If you want to run the code in any of the notebooks - [read our instructions](./how-to-run.md), and find more advice on how to do it [in this blog post](https://soshnikov.com/education/how-to-execute-notebooks-from-github/).

> **Note**: [Instructions on how to run the code in this curriculum](./how-to-run.md)

## Self Study

However, if you would like to take the course as a self-study project, we suggest that you fork the entire repo to your own GitHub account and complete the exercises on your own or with a group:

* Start with a pre-lecture quiz.
* Read the intro text for the lecture.
* If the lecture has additional notebooks, go through them, reading and executing the code. If both TensorFlow and PyTorch notebooks are provided, you can focus on one of them - choose your favorite framework.
* Notebooks often contain some of the challenges that require you to tweak the code a little bit to experiment.
* Take the post-lecture quiz.
* If there is a lab attached to the module - complete the assignment.
* Visit the [Discussion board](https://github.com/microsoft/AI-For-Beginners/discussions) to "learn out loud".

> For further study, we recommend following these [Microsoft Learn](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/users/dmitrysoshnikov-9132/collections/31zgizg2p418yo/?WT.mc_id=academic-77998-cacaste) modules and learning paths.

**Teachers**, we have [included some suggestions](./for-teachers.md) on how to use this curriculum.

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## Pedagogy

We have chosen two pedagogical tenets while building this curriculum: ensuring that it is hands-on **project-based** and that it includes **frequent quizzes**.

By ensuring that the content aligns with projects, the process is made more engaging for students and retention of concepts will be augmented. In addition, a low-stakes quiz before a class sets the intention of the student towards learning a topic, while a second quiz after class ensures further retention. This curriculum was designed to be flexible and fun and can be taken in whole or in part. The projects start small and become increasingly complex by the end of the 12-week cycle.

> **A note about quizzes**: All quizzes are contained [in this app](https://red-field-0a6ddfd03.1.azurestaticapps.net/), for 50 total quizzes of three questions each. They are linked from within the lessons but the quiz app can be run locally; follow the instructions in the `etc/quiz-app` folder.

## Offline access

You can run this documentation offline by using [Docsify](https://docsify.js.org/#/). Fork this repo, [install Docsify](https://docsify.js.org/#/quickstart) on your local machine, and then in the root folder of this repo, type `docsify serve`. The website will be served on port 3000 on your localhost: `localhost:3000`. A pdf of the curriculum is available [at this link](/etc/pdf/readme.pdf).