What is the AI evolution at LCCC?

The college’s new Artificial Intelligence program helps students prepare for a rapidly changing workforce.

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Students in a classroom at LCCC toggle between datasets and lines of code, testing machine learning models inside Jupyter notebooks. 
The work is part of LCCC’s Artificial Intelligence program, which introduces students to programming, data analysis and machine learning tools increasingly used across modern industries. The program was developed by Trevor Swarm, an instructor in the college’s STEM Pathway. 

“The goal is to help students understand how these systems work so they can use them responsibly and effectively,” Trevor said.  

The AI program, part of LCCC’s STEM Pathway, introduces students to machine learning, data analysis and the growing ecosystem of AI tools being integrated into modern workplaces.  

For LCCC student John Larimore, the program’s existence alone was striking. 

John is not a typical college student. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics with an emphasis in probability and statistics more than a decade ago and spent eight years working in the wind-energy industry analyzing production data. Now he’s back in the classroom at LCCC pursuing an associate’s degree in artificial intelligence. 

The coursework, he said, picks up directly where some of his earlier statistics training ended. 

“In [upper-level math course] at [Metropolitan State University of] Denver, we used a standard book on regression models,” Larimore said. 

For John, the goal is not another credential. The classes are helping him build tools for a long-term project analyzing U.S. wind energy production with public data. 

Not every student in the program arrives with that level of professional experience. In the same classroom, second-year student Gavin Thornock is still exploring where the field might take him. 

Thornock, who grew up in Glenrock, originally enrolled at LCCC to study computer science after discovering coding in a high school class. He later shifted directions after realizing how much calculus the traditional computer science track required. 

The artificial intelligence coursework offered a different path. 

Right now, the work focuses on analyzing data and writing code to visualize results. Students run their programs through platforms such as Jupyter Notebook and Google Colab, tools widely used in data science. 

Artificial intelligence careers are still taking shape, but the skills students are learning — analyzing data, writing code and understanding how AI tools function — are increasingly relevant across industries. 

“We are in a new world,” John said. “And it’s best to go in with a map.”