Building an MCP Server

Students learn to build the server side of the Model Context Protocol — the side that exposes real capabilities to any agent. Starting from a conceptual understanding of MCP, they stand up a working server in Python with FastMCP, define a tool the agent can invoke, and expose read-only resources and reusable prompts. Security is treated as a first-class topic: students learn why an unauthenticated server is a genuine vulnerability, how to apply least privilege, and how to add validation and permission guards so unsafe calls fail safely instead of executing. By the end, a student can author a small, well-scoped, defensible MCP server that an agent could safely use.