Building computer science instruction for everyone requires understanding and supporting learner motivations beyond software development. Some learners value understanding the purpose of the code more than writing code, and might become end-user programmers or conversational programmers. However, existing CS instruction focuses mainly on code-writing skills. And while there have been efforts to integrate computing into other disciplines, this requires immense time and effort from instructors. Moreover, these integrated materials may not be appropriate for general education computing courses, which provide an overview of computing to students from a variety of disciplines. To address this problem, we designed and tested three interactive tutorials in the lab sessions of an introductory computing course for non-majors. Instead of teaching programming from scratch, these purpose-first tutorials highlight the purpose and basics of authentic programming libraries and tools, such as SQL queries, web-scraping libraries in Python, and HTTP requests. They are short (<1 hour), require minimal prior knowledge, and can be easily included in existing courses. The learning objectives of our activities are to help students understand why and when these tools are useful and encourage them to explore these tools in problems they might encounter in their disciplines. We observe that the activities were beneficial in improving confidence and providing a conceptual understanding of several tools. We present lessons learned to inform the design of similar activities for teaching computing as general knowledge to diverse audiences.