Google Gemini for Beginners: From Basics to Building AI Apps Course Syllabus

Overview: This course takes you from the fundamentals of Google Gemini to building and deploying AI-powered applications. With a hands-on, API-first approach, you'll explore text and image modalities, prompt engineering, embeddings, chat interfaces, and real-world deployment. Each module includes practical exercises and real-world integration scenarios. The course spans 8 modules, designed to be completed in approximately 8 weeks with a time commitment of 4-6 hours per week, totaling around 40 hours of learning and doing.

Module 1: Introduction to Google Gemini

Estimated time: 5 hours

• Overview of Gemini models (Ultra, Pro, Nano)
• API authentication and key management
• Setting up the Google AI Studio and API console
• Making your first generateText() API call

Module 2: Text Generation & Prompt Engineering

Estimated time: 5 hours

• Designing effective text prompts
• Controlling output length, format, and tone
• Handling edge cases and improving response quality
• Building a marketing copy generation microservice

Module 3: Embeddings & Semantic Search

Estimated time: 5 hours

• Generating text embeddings using Gemini
• Understanding vector representations and similarity
• Indexing document corpora for search
• Implementing a semantic search endpoint

Module 4: Image Understanding & Generation

Estimated time: 5 hours

• Image captioning with Gemini Vision
• Answering questions about image content
• Performing image-to-image transformations
• Building an app for tagging and describing uploaded images

Module 5: Chat & Conversational Interfaces

Estimated time: 5 hours

• Designing multi-turn conversations
• Maintaining context and session memory
• Implementing persona-based chatbots
• Adding fallback and error handling in chat flows

Module 6: Integration & Deployment

Estimated time: 6 hours

• Integrating Gemini API into web and mobile apps
• Using serverless functions for scalable AI features
• Implementing robust error handling and retries
• Deploying a Flask or Node.js app with Gemini endpoints

Module 7: Monitoring, Security & Cost Optimization

Estimated time: 5 hours

• Tracking API usage and setting rate limits
• Implementing logging and alerting systems
• Managing API quotas and budget controls
• Securing API keys and user data

Module 8: Capstone Project

Estimated time: 8 hours

• Designing an end-to-end Gemini-powered application
• Implementing and testing a complete AI feature set
• Presenting a demo of your AI-driven helpdesk assistant or similar app

Prerequisites

• Familiarity with REST APIs and HTTP requests
• Basic experience with web development (JavaScript or Python)
• Understanding of JSON and API authentication (API keys)

What You'll Be Able to Do After

• Use Google Gemini APIs to generate high-quality text and images
• Design and optimize prompts for real-world applications
• Implement semantic search and embedding pipelines
• Build and deploy conversational AI interfaces
• Integrate, monitor, and secure Gemini in production environments