As a sophomore living off campus and responsible for cooking her own meals, University of Delaware marketing major Tara LaMantia looked for recipe apps to help improve her skills, but found they didn’t include a lot of features she was looking for, especially when she needed to make adjustments.
So with the help of a recent artificial intelligence (AI) boot camp led by Andrew McMartin, assistant professor of accounting in UD’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, she built her own website in just three weeks.
LaMantia created KitchenLink, “a platform where I can share recipes with family and friends and create more of a community-environment,” she said. Her website included features like a serving multiplier, cooking mode with timers and voice command controls.
“My family is so excited to use it,” she said.
The boot camp’s ideation began over the winter when McMartin was checking out new agentic AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code, Codex and Google Authority – programs that can take multi-step actions with minimal human oversight. It took him just a couple of nights to put together an app for one of his accounting classes.
“I told Carolyn (Levine, professor of accounting and department chair) we have to get in front of this with students right away,” McMartin said. “I was happy to hold a couple of sessions to introduce the tools and workflows I’ve used to do this. And it came together really quickly.”
McMartin’s goal was to create an optimized and accessible experience for students, “so I could get students who’ve never coded before to build an application on their computer, get connected to an online database and publish it online, all for free,” he said.
He selected the coding platform Cursor, since it offered a 12-month free trial program for students and paired it with a free database provider and free website host.
McMartin made a flyer and sent it to a couple of his fellow professors, hoping to get 15 interested students. He got a whole lot more.
“Within the first 24 hours, I had 40 registrants lined up, and after I closed the registration, I had another 40 in the wait list. It blew my mind,” he said.
Twenty-four students, from freshmen to graduate students, attended the first two-hour session in March, led by McMartin and Kirubakaran Devaprasad, a UD graduate student pursuing his master’s in business analytics and information management (BAIM). Devaprasad was a teaching assistant for the boot camp and helped review the curriculum.
The workshop participants began by asking ChatGPT to write a poem, then prompted Cursor to save it in a file and create a simple HTML page with color and a theme. The students then asked Cursor to write an entire website, starting with six poems it generated, put each poem on a separate page and create JavaScript code for users to scroll through the different menu of poems.
“That was 20 minutes into the meeting,” McMartin stated, illustrating the effectiveness of the program. “That’s how big of a step forward these AI models made in December and January, and why I said we have to be moving on this right now.”
By the end of the second session, each student not only had a poetry website online, but new visitors to the sites could create accounts; write, post and share their own poems; and like each other’s poems.
The final meeting began with opening remarks from Joe Averbukh, CEO of InstantDB, the data service provider the group was using. Averbukh discussed his own experience starting in business but transitioning to tech, job-prep strategies, and the importance of combining subject matter with expertise in AI.
Students then delivered five-minute presentations detailing their own projects they created. Their websites featured apps such as retailing produce to local communities, financial forecast analysis, college comparisons, gym workout tracking and community-sharing movie reviews.
“I was most impressed with the variety of ideas the students came up with,” said McMartin, who hopes to offer the camp again during the fall semester. “It was cool to see them take the basic tools in so many directions, whether a hobby or a personal interest of theirs. I was pleased to see them be able to walk away with something that was immediately relevant to applying for jobs and taking the next steps in their careers.”
Jayti Sparaia, a BAIM grad student who created DailyBite, a social media journal for food lovers who want to log their daily meals and share recipes with friends, had wanted to build her own website for a while but did not have the coding experience necessary.
“After completing this boot camp and building the app, I’ve learned more about the ability of Cursor and all the tools we have now to build up this site,” she said.
Freshman finance major Justin Tran, whose presentation detailed best results for local restaurants based on users’ desire for types of meals, was eager to learn new AI tools early in his college career.
“I was intrigued not just because it’s something I can put on my resume, but something I can learn,” he said. “As a younger student, expanding my knowledge and trying new things is something I want to pursue.
“I’ve gained a lot of valuable insight from just coming here to collaborate with others, working on my own project as well as talking with peers. Going through this whole process has really helped me.”
Charles Walker, a graduate student pursuing his master’s in international business, used his app to aid with his current project, helping to increase food access to residents living in food deserts through a community-based business model.
“I’ve learned how easy it is to go from idea to prototype,” said Walker, who plans to partner with the community development corporation in Camden, N.J. “Before this, I felt like the concept that I had to actually create this idea would cost thousands of dollars, but I just spent the last three weeks creating this and I spent nothing.
“My venture would not have been possible three years ago,” Walker continued, emphasizing the importance of his younger peers to understand the AI skills needed for the market they’ll be entering.
“I’ve had three or four job interviews, and in every one we talked about how I’m using AI,” Saparia said. “People want to see how creative you are, so this is a pretty good way to showcase my work.”
Nineteen students earned the Certificate of Completion at the conclusion of the boot camp: Shubhi Bajpai, Rahul Chauhan, Mahita Cheruba Raja, Justin Farquar, Gemma Guan, Lukas Haracz, Tony Lee, Yushan Liu, Tara LaMantia, Kushal Mathad, Connor McIntyre, Amanda L. Mensah, Garrett Minner, Darshan Patel, Jayti Saparia, Om Satam, Justin Tran, Luke Wagner, Charles Walker.