Solving the Gemini API Challenge Lab on Vertex AI: Text, Function Calling & Video Understanding

The "Explore Generative AI with the Gemini API in Vertex AI: Challenge Lab" on Google Cloud Skills Boost throws three Gemini capabilities at you in one sitting: a raw REST call from Cloud Shell, function calling from a Jupyter notebook, and multimodal video analysis. None of it is hard once you know what the verifier is actually checking — but a couple of things are easy to get wrong on the first attempt and the lab gives you almost no feedback when you do. This walkthrough is the version of the