Practitioner-led curriculum delivered at your institution — from fifth grade through college. We bring the content, the tools, and the instruction. You bring the students.
BlackskyUp is Blacksky Labs' apprenticeship and education program — built on 25 years of enterprise software experience delivering AI, data, and infrastructure systems for federal agencies and Fortune 500 clients. We don't teach AI from a textbook. We teach it from the inside of systems we built.
We partner with schools, community colleges, and universities to deliver curriculum your faculty aren't yet positioned to teach. We handle instruction, materials, and student tools — including Maurice, our production LLM platform where every student builds and deploys a real RAG chatbot. Your institution provides the classroom, the students, and the contract.
Mario doesn't teach AI the way most people teach it — from the outside looking in. He teaches it from inside the systems he built.
As founder of Blacksky Labs, Mario has spent more than two decades architecting AI, data, and infrastructure systems for federal agencies and Fortune 500 clients. He's not presenting slides about technology — he's built it, shipped it, and maintained it in production. Every concept he introduces in the classroom is one he has used in a real system.
His master's in Education means he understands how people learn — how to sequence ideas, scaffold complexity, and meet students where they are. His master's in Exhibition Design means he knows how to make abstract ideas tangible — how to turn something invisible like a neural network into something a 6th grader can hold in their mind and an administrator can actually get excited about.
That combination — deep technical fluency, pedagogical training, and a designer's instinct for clarity — is rare. It's what makes a BlackskyUp class feel different from every other AI workshop a student has sat through.
What AI actually is — and what it isn't. Hands-on exploration with age-appropriate tools.
Move from user to builder. Students ship a working AI product by end of program.
Production-grade skills for students entering the AI economy — or building inside it.
High-impact exposure session. Ideal for intro events, career days, STEM fairs, or administrator buy-in demos.
3–5 consecutive days. Compressed and focused. Best for summer programs, school breaks, or workforce bootcamps.
6–12 weekly sessions. Mirrors a semester elective. Allows pacing, iteration, and capstone project development.
Embedded as a co-instructor or standalone elective. Full curriculum arc with student portfolio outcomes.
Our flagship curriculum introduces students to the technology behind ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini — through practitioner-led, hands-on learning. Structured in two grade-level tiers and four delivery formats, LLM 101 can be deployed in a single day or across a full semester.
Concept-first and analogy-driven. Students explore AI through creative, hands-on activities with minimal jargon. Focuses on building curiosity, critical thinking, and responsible use.
Technically deeper and career-connected. Students engage with architecture, prompt engineering, bias auditing, and AI policy. Outcomes include portfolio-ready capstone projects.
| Topic | Workshop | Intensive | Weekly | Residency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What is AI? What is an LLM? | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Tokens, prediction & how LLMs process language | Intro | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Prompt engineering — foundations | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Prompt engineering — advanced strategies | — | Intro | ✓ | ✓ |
| AI ethics & bias | Discussion | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Hallucinations, accuracy & critical evaluation | — | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Training data & how models learn | — | Intro | ✓ | ✓ |
| AI policy, governance & society | — | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Fine-tuning & model customization | — | — | Intro | ✓ |
| Capstone project & student portfolio | — | Mini | ✓ | ✓ |
This isn't a passive experience. Every BlackskyUp class ends with a working product. Maurice is our production LLM SaaS platform — the same infrastructure we use internally — handed directly to students. Each student gets a personal workspace for the period of the class and a life long membership to the online BlackskyUp Academy.
Students upload any source material — notes, articles, textbooks, research, PDFs. Maurice indexes it and makes it retrievable by the model.
Students define who their chatbot is, what it knows, how it responds, and what it refuses to do. This is where prompt engineering becomes real.
The chatbot goes live — grounded in their documents, shaped by their prompt. Students can test it, share it, and iterate on it. It's theirs.
Every student's chatbot is published to their personal page on the BlackskyUp Academy site. A real portfolio artifact, not a screenshot.
Why this matters: The moment a student deploys a chatbot that answers questions from documents they chose, using instructions they wrote — they stop being consumers of AI and become builders of it. That shift is the whole point.
All engagements are custom-scoped. Rates below are starting points — final pricing reflects student count, session frequency, prep complexity, and travel. We will not walk away from a school that has the will and not the budget. Ask about tiered and sliding-scale options.
| Format | Typical Duration | Starting Rate | Best Fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single-Day Workshop | 4–6 hours |
$1,500 – $3,000
flat fee · up to 30 students
|
STEM events, career days, intro sessions |
| Multi-Day Intensive | 3–5 days |
$4,500 – $9,000
flat fee · up to 25 students
|
Summer programs, school breaks, bootcamps |
| Weekly Series | 6–12 weeks |
$800 – $1,200 / session
or $6,500 – $12,000 flat · up to 25 students
|
CTE electives, after-school, community college |
| Semester Residency | 16–18 weeks |
$18,000 – $28,000
flat · includes curriculum dev & materials
|
University elective, full CTE integration |
| Per-Student Add-On | Any format |
$75 – $150 / student
for groups exceeding base cap
|
Scaling up any engagement |
Travel: In-region (DMV) travel included in rate. Overnight travel billed at cost.
Payment terms: 50% deposit upon contract execution. Balance due within 15 days of final session.
Cancellation: Full deposit refund if cancelled 30+ days out. 50% deposit retained within 30 days. Balance not owed if cancelled before delivery.
Materials: Student access to Blacksky's Maurice platform included for all formats. Printed materials billed at cost for engagements requiring them.
Let's start with a 20-minute call. We'll scope the right format for your calendar, budget, and students — and get you a custom proposal within one week.