Classroom

After being recommended it by a former colleague, I was listening to the “You can learn with AI” episode of the Change, Technically podcast (which was really good, check it out) and it got me thinking: As educators, what do we really want to get out of generative AI (or even AI in general)? I tinker with things all the time because I like understanding where the edges are, but in an ideal world (setting aside the considerable ethical, technical, accuracy and fabrication issues) what would we want tools like this to do? ...

It’s 2026 and I’ve been trying to decide what AI and LLMs are useful for in my day to day teaching. One of the things that has been floating around has been the promise of reducing admin time for teachers using LLMs, but I honestly haven’t found the argument to be that compelling. I don’t trust it near the things that take up most of my admin time like communicating with students, parents, and partner schools. It’s mostly been terrible for curriculum planning, mediocre at best for assessment design, and laughably bad at generating lesson slides, particularly anything involving diagrams. ...

Note: There’s a companion post to this about using agentic AI here. Pre(r)amble I have a problem. Well, I have several problems, but this post is specifically about my habit of seeing a neat looking microcontroller, not really thinking about whether I need another one, and then buying a couple (because, well, you need two just in case, right?). In the office I have: A stack of v1 micro:bits Some third party micro:bit clones Several v2 micro:bits Raspberry Pi Picos (2040) DFRobot Beetles (ATmega) DFRobot Firebeetles (ESP32) Some ESP8266s Various ESP32 variants (some camera versions, some plain boards) How many have I actually gotten around to writing code on? One of the Firebeetles 😂 …and all of the micro:bits. Why? Having nice accessible inputs and outputs makes programming so much more enjoyable. The micro:bit completely nails this - no faffing around with which pin to use for the buttons, no I2C or SPI nonsense needed to poke at the accelerometer, and nothing funky to do to access the display, sound, or mic. Just use the nice simple API, load the code via USB and off you go. Even when running peripheral sensors, servos, etc the micro:bit is just a joy to get going with. ...

As a teacher of relatively hands-on subjects, I regularly get roped into running sessions with groups of Year 6 students coming in for Orientation Days. Since getting my first batch of Micro:bits I have been running short sessions with physical computing since it’s short and accessible, and the kids can achieve something concrete by the end of a 45 minute session. The last couple of years I have been running sessions using laser cut Inchworm robots, where students hook up a servo, battery, and infrared sensor (to demonstrate external sensing but also to remove the need to fiddle with buttons on moving objects) to the Micro:bit, and then write some basic code investigating ideal angles of movement for the servo, delay time in between moves, and utilising loops. ...

I recently got around to trying out the new-ish Python mode for coding within Minecraft: Education Edition, and whilst it is refreshing to be able to write code, the lack of a code library to be able to refer to made learning the Minecraft-specific commands somewhat difficult. Enter code introspection, which is the ability to look inside classes and methods from within Python to list them and see what is available, or to show their docstring and discover their arguments. ...

Back in 2017 when I was first thinking about how I could use physical computing like Micro:bits in my classroom, I wrote some quick and nasty programs to demonstrate networking concepts like attenuation and latency in wireless connections as well as adapting some ideas from the Networking With the micro:bit book, and using basic wired networks for Morse Code (the linked site is not the original project I used the idea from, but there are only so many permutations). ...

Last year when looking at wireless concepts with my Year 8 Digital Technologies students, I wrote a program for wireless beacons and laser cut a Ghostbusters style PKE Meter with some servos and a RGB LED for students to go on a hunt in our library. It was a good opportunity to look at things like the range of wireless signals, interference due to obstruction of different materials, and noisy broadcast channels. The students quite enjoyed it and it was a nice excuse to get out of the classroom. ...

In 2019 I started up a programming-oriented Data Science class with my Year 10s. I ran two classes during the year, each spanning a semester. My aim for the course was to introduce students to different ways of storing, retrieving, and working with data, as well as give some coverage over different types of data and some operations that you can perform with it (e.g. numeric, text, spatial). I ran a different main project with each class: during the first semester I looked at analysing data from the Australian Federal Government Hansard. Unfortunately, the students in the group weren’t very interested in it, and (like many of my first time projects) the scope turned out to be overly broad, meaning students had trouble figuring out what they would do from all the alternatives of what they could do. Tangentially, working with the XML from the Hansard is a great (or terrible, depending on your perspective) activity in data cleaning - they’ve made some… interesting decisions about how to format their data inside the XML structure. ...

This is a bit of a retrospective of teaching Robotics as a subject to Year 8 students this year. A bit of a theme for my newish subjects tends to be a reduction in expectations as I filter out what I would have liked to have worked into what actually worked and variations on a theme. The three themes I’ve really thought about since I started teaching this subject are: ...

Motivation This term I’ve been working through Data Representation and some Networks concepts with my Year 8 students. I used Micro:bits extensively for both aspects of this for the hands-on approach and ready access to simple networking code. To finish off the term, after looking at things like network latency, I thought it’d be fun to do an activity built around attenuation of wireless signals. Previously I’ve had students group up in pairs and have the Micro:bits send an image back and forth pixel by pixel. This allows for students to see when messages have not arrived as they will have missing pixels from their displays. ...