What I teach, week by week.
Five weekly lessons: 60 minutes for ages 8–11, or 90 minutes for ages 12–18. Both courses cost A$250 per student. We begin with the foundations of using AI, practise together on creative and practical tasks, then develop a project of each child’s choice. The focus throughout is asking clearly, making thoughtful choices and checking the work.
Get to know AI
We explore what AI can help with, how it can get things wrong and what makes an instruction useful. Students try a small creative task and compare different results.
What I teach
- How a clear purpose, context and examples shape a response
- AI can produce convincing mistakes and should be checked
- When to ask a follow-up question and when to check another source
- What information to keep out of a prompt
How they practise it
- Compare a vague request with a specific one
- Draft a short story or a poster concept for an imagined event
- Change the audience, tone or format and compare the results
- Record one mistake or unsupported claim in the Wrongness Log
A useful brief gives AI context and sets limits. Then we check the result.
Make something useful
We build a simple personal webpage together. Students practise turning an idea into a brief, shaping the content and making a series of small, deliberate improvements.
What I teach
- Describe the purpose, audience and essential parts of a project
- Ask for one change at a time and save useful versions
- Edit text and design choices yourself, as well as with AI
- Check that links, instructions and simple interactions work
How they practise it
- Plan a one-page guide to a hobby or an imagined club
- Draft the content, then check and edit it in their own words
- Create a first version and improve the layout and wording
- Test it with a classmate and restore a saved version
Start with their idea
Each child chooses a main project connected to their interests. It could be a creative piece, a useful tool, a website, an explainer or a game. We make a plan they can finish.
What I teach
- Define who a project is for and what it should help them do
- Choose a suitable format before choosing the tools
- Break a big idea into a small first version
- Decide which parts need AI assistance and which need their own judgement
How they practise it
- Choose a project and write a short brief
- Reduce a big idea: “help me study everything” becomes “a quiz from one page of notes”
- Create a first version with the main idea in place
- Explain what they made, what works and what still needs attention
Make the result better
Students learn to look past a polished first impression. They check accuracy, try the project with someone else and use feedback to decide what to improve.
What I teach
- Check factual claims and references against trusted material
- Review writing for clarity, tone and originality
- Test a tool or website from another person’s point of view
- Turn feedback into a short list of worthwhile improvements
How they practise it
- Swap projects and ask a classmate to read, view or use theirs
- Notice confusing instructions, missing context or things that fail
- Check answers, facts and links where the project includes them
- Refine the work and compare it with the previous version
Show what they made
We finish the project, prepare it for sharing and practise explaining the decisions behind it. Parents see both the finished work and the learning that got it there.
What I teach
- Decide what is finished and what can wait for another version
- Give credit for sources and be clear about where AI helped
- Save or export the work in a format suited to the project
- Explain a creative choice, an improvement and something they checked
How they practise it
- Work through the most important feedback
- Add final wording, design details and appropriate credits
- Save the finished project and the useful prompts behind it
- Give a sixty-second demonstration or presentation at Demo Day
Four skills, all five weeks
We return to these skills in every lesson. At the end, each child gets a progress card showing where they are on each one, so you can see what they learned as well as what they made.
Plan
Work out what it should do before opening the AI, and cut the idea down to something they can finish.
Describe
Say exactly what you want, one change at a time, clearly enough that a very literal machine gets it right.
Test
Check what comes back and notice when it's wrong, especially when it looks right.
Fix
Improve the writing, design or code, use feedback and saved versions, and choose a new approach when needed.