A Kalispell nonprofit is using AI to finish a backlog of coding lessons

Code Girls United started in 2016 with a small group of girls and laptops. It now serves about 1,000 girls at 49 sites around Montana, including rural and tribal communities, and it is using artificial intelligence to keep its curriculum from falling behind that growth.

NBC Montana reported Oct. 16 that the Kalispell nonprofit had a stack of AI Academy videos waiting to be turned into classroom materials. AIFluency, a Montana company, built a workflow in Claude, Anthropic’s system, that drafts a lesson plan from a transcript in minutes. Staff still review and approve every lesson before it goes out.

Founder and CEO Marianne Smith told the station that the students “that really can effectively use it, effectively question it, which is a big part of what we do, and then build with it are going to be the ones that are going to have securer futures.” Cody Rose, AIFluency’s founder and CEO, said the aim was to get those plans to teachers “in maybe rural communities or reservations where these teachers might not have much experience teaching AI or computer science, frankly, at all.”

In a case study, AIFluency said building each lesson by hand had been taking a staff member about 32 hours, and that more than 30 lessons were waiting, a backlog it put at more than 900 hours. The first gathering, the company said, was 28 girls in the basement of Sykes Diner in Kalispell. Code Girls United now runs the workflow in its own Claude workspace, and the vendor said no student data goes into it.

Anthropic has named AIFluency a Select partner in its Claude Partner Network, Rose told NBC Montana. He and his co-founder have been traveling the state to help businesses and nonprofits make sense of the tools, he said.

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