Interview about Roald Dahl’s life and career

In preparation for reading 'James and the Giant Peach', give students more context about the author by having them interview AI Roald Dahl.

Teaching goals

With inquisitive 3rd graders reading imaginative stories such as those by Roald Dahl, it only feels fitting to have students be able to satisfy their curiosity through a natural and free-form Q&A session with an AI version of Dahl. This teacher created a tutor to enable students to ask about Dahl’s life as a pre-reading activity to better understand the author and his works.

To target the information students will learn about Dahl, the teacher here linked to Dahl’s website and explained the context around why the students are learning about Dahl’s life:

Extra customization

To set the language level of the AI Roald Dahl, teachers can use the grade level selector when setting up the assignment to give the AI context about the age of their students.

For younger students, enabling Flint’s text-to-speech and speech-to-text can help make the conversation both feel more realistic and make it more accessible to students who may be struggling with reading comprehension or typing skills.

The teacher used the live preview to get a sense of scope of knowledge covered and complexity of language. They then used the revise feature to adjust how the AI is responding to be more concise.

Student experience

This assignment could be done in the typical fashion with students chatting with AI 1:1, but it can also be completed as a group or whole class assignment. Both modes have pros and cons:

1:1 interviews of Dahl

This will give you as a teacher more insight into each students’ critical thinking and questioning skills. Each student will be able to ask all the questions that cross their mind and, with the conversation transcripts, you as the teacher can see how each student carried out the interview.

Class-wide Interview

You can host a class-wide interview by projecting Flint on a smart board and interviewing the AI Dahl as a class. We’ve seen teachers use this technique to moderate the conversation and manage the expectations of students as they interact with AI. This could be a good introduction to how Flint and AI in general work in order to prep students for following AI assignments.

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