Course 1 Supplement — Systems Thinking in the AI Era

Code, labs, and challenge templates that accompany Course I: The Seven Building Blocks at systemthinkinglab.ai.

You do not need this repo to take the course. The course site walks you through everything. This repo exists so you can:

• Run the discovery labs locally on your machine.
• Download the challenge submission templates as plain markdown.
• Read the canonical Python implementations of the 7 building blocks and 3 external entities.

Repository structure

course1-supplement/
├── building_blocks/
│   ├── building_blocks.py     # The 7 universal building blocks
│   ├── external_entities.py   # The 3 external entities
│   └── __init__.py
│
├── labs/course1/
│   ├── lab1_queue_worker.py   # Lab 1: Queue + Worker discovery
│   └── lab2_time_worker.py    # Lab 2: Time + Worker discovery
│
├── challenges/course1/
│   ├── part1-mvp-foundation.md   # Challenge 1, Part 1: MVP Foundation
│   ├── part2-viral-growth.md     # Challenge 1, Part 2: Viral Growth Evolution
│   └── part3-live-streaming.md   # Challenge 1, Part 3: Live Cooking Sessions
│
├── requirements.txt
└── LICENSE

The 7 building blocks

Type	Block	Description
Task	Service	Synchronous request/response processing
Task	Worker	Asynchronous background processing
Storage	Queue	Message passing and task hand-off
Storage	Key-Value Store	Caching and fast lookups
Storage	File Store	Media and large blob storage
Storage	Relational Database	Structured data with relationships
Storage	Vector Database	AI embeddings and similarity search

The 3 external entities

Entity	Description
User	Human interactions with the system
External Service	Third-party APIs and integrations
Time	Scheduled triggers and time-based events

Running the labs

Prerequisites

• Python 3.8 or newer

Setup

git clone https://github.com/kayashaolu/course1-supplement.git
cd course1-supplement

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate   # Windows: venv\Scripts\activate

pip install -r requirements.txt

Run a lab

python labs/course1/lab1_queue_worker.py
python labs/course1/lab2_time_worker.py

Each lab is self-contained, prints a typewriter-style narrative, and asks 3 multiple-choice questions per experiment. Read the prompts and answer at your own pace.

The challenge templates

challenges/course1/ contains the technical design document templates for the 3-part Course 1 challenge: ChefConnect, a social recipe platform.

Part	Title	What you design
1	MVP Foundation	The initial 5-requirement architecture: recipes, search, user profiles, photo upload, social feed.
2	Viral Growth Evolution	The platform jumps from 10K to 2M users in 3 months. Add caching, optimization, and scale recovery without adding features.
3	Live Cooking Sessions	Add live video broadcasting with sub-100ms chat for up to 5,000 concurrent viewers per chef, on top of your Part 2 design.

Each part is a separate submission. The course site grades your design with AI-powered feedback; the templates here mirror the structure the grader expects.

Course series

This is Course I of a 4-course series:

• Course I: The Seven Building Blocks (you are here)
• Course II: Content Systems (Instagram, Netflix, YouTube)
• Course III: Real-Time Systems (Slack, Discord, WhatsApp)
• Course IV: Business Integration Systems (Stripe, Shopify, Salesforce)

systemthinkinglab.ai

License

See LICENSE.

Author

Kay Ashaolu — UC Berkeley School of Information