Teaching people to use AI, and to build with it
OpenSkills is a non-profit focused on AI education, literacy, and the development of real apps and tools. Free, hands-on, and aimed at the people the tech industry usually skips.
The OpenSkills hackathon
Real-world AI solutions for charities and businesses. Migrant workers and students welcome.
Access
AI tools are only useful to people who can reach them. We provide laptops, teaching, and time at no cost to the learner.
Literacy
Beyond prompts: understanding what these systems do, where they fail, and how to judge their output.
Building
Every participant ships something. A course ends with a capstone project and a published tool or app, not a slide deck.
The first OpenSkills course
OpenSkills is currently one program: I'm personally tutoring 20 migrant workers from It's Raining Raincoats, a Singapore charity working on the wellbeing of migrant workers here.
It's the first OpenSkills Applied AI & Development course: five weeks, every Sunday at 11am for an hour and a half, starting 23 August. All 20 laptops are provided by me, so nobody needs to own hardware to take part.
Participants finish the program with a capstone project and a published tool or app of their own.
- Cohort
- 20 migrant workers
- Partner
- It's Raining Raincoats
- Starts
- 23 August
- Length
- 5 weeks · Sundays
- Time
- 11:00am · 1.5 hours
- Cost to learners
- S$0 · laptops provided
Small numbers, real outcomes
OpenSkills is young, so we measure impact by what each learner can do afterwards, not by scale. Here is what cohort 01 amounts to.
Learners reached
Migrant workers from It's Raining Raincoats, each finishing cohort 01 with a published app they built themselves.
Weeks of teaching
Sunday sessions of 1.5 hours, from the Aug 23 to Sep 20.
App shipped per learner
Every participant leaves with a real, published tool, not a certificate or a slide deck.
The curriculum
- Week 01Getting onlineLaptop setup, accounts, and a working mental model of what an AI assistant actually is.
- Week 02Using AI wellPractical prompting for work, admin, translation and daily life, plus where these tools quietly get things wrong.
- Week 03Automating tasksTurning a repeated task into a repeatable workflow, with AI doing the boring middle part.
- Week 04Building a toolGoing from an idea to a working app using AI development tools, with no prior coding required.
- Week 05Ship and presentPublishing the capstone project and presenting it to the group.
Yibo Yang
I'm a student, founder, and philanthropist based in Singapore. Before OpenSkills I founded ForAnother, a non-profit that has raised upwards of S$5,700 for students in South Africa and Singapore.
I also built Snapiq, a Chrome extension with 100+ users that merges screenshots so students can get around AI upload limits.
Out in the field
Photos from ForAnother fundraisers in Singapore and South Africa. Full album on Instagram.
FAQ
Want to help the next cohort happen?
Laptops, venues, mentors and partner briefs all move this forward.