Campfire Session — Lower Schools Fall '25

Explore AI implementation strategies for lower schools, covering both teacher-facing and student-facing use cases for chats and activities, plus essential tips for creating age-appropriate AI experiences for young learners.

Lulu Gao, Head of Teacher Experience at Flint | LinkedIn

In this session, we covered both teacher-facing and student-facing lower school use cases for chats and activities. We demonstrated how educators can leverage Flint chats for their own material creation and lesson planning while also designing engaging, differentiated, and age-appropriate Flint activities for young students to use directly. You'll discover practical techniques for building AI interactions that match the developmental needs of elementary learners and support teachers in creating more effective learning environments.

Content covered in this session included:

• Chats for lower school teachers
• Lower school activity creation
• AI analytics of student performance
• Activity usage with young learners
• Teacher-facing activities
• Educator shareouts

Slides from the presentation can be found here.

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Introduction • 00:00

• Lulu introduces the session and explains how the original session was not recorded, but was re-recorded here.

Ice-breaking news • 01:49

• Ice-breaking news about Adam Raine's tragedy and loss of life after confiding in ChatGPT was discussed.
• The discussion highlights growing concerns around AI safety and governance in schools, emphasizing that effective oversight and proactive guardrails are essential.
• The importance of teaching AI literacy from lower school levels is underscored as a foundational priority for safe usage.

Chats for teachers • 05:16

• Lulu demonstrates how Sparky can memorize user context for personalized interactions. It is explained that the system can remember user characteristics and use them to tailor experiences for bilingual third grade teachers in Mexico, including memory of their teaching role and location.
• A practical demo of Sparky as a research assistant is presented, showing it can search the Internet, cite sources, and provide country-specific environmental policy insights for a unit on conservation. The context is customized to a bilingual, English-Spanish classroom in Mexico.
• Lulu discusses generating lesson plans and documents with Sparky, including bilingual rubrics and multilingual support. It is shown that Flint can create, attach, and export documents, and that users can upload content and interact via chats and whiteboards.

Building lower school activities • 20:10

• A demonstration of creating a custom activity begins, including attaching a spelling list and configuring unit focus. The process emphasizes user guidance and automatic setup, with follow-up prompts outlining required details and validation steps.
• Lulu explains how to preview and test the activity, including a session simulation and the option to run the session manually. The interaction highlights student-friendly settings and the ability to role-play as a student to see responses.
• Sparky can be configured for listening-only input and student responses, expanding accessibility and input options. The setup enables teachers to tailor input/output modes per activity and to personalize difficulty based on performance.
• The activity supports personalized pacing by adjusting word difficulty and rewarding progress with a generated image after ten words. Flint handles user prompts to collect favorites and to create motivational visuals.

AI analytics • 30:52

• Feedback students get from Flint is explained and shown. The evidence basis for feedback is reviewed, and students see it after completion.
• Analytics features are discussed, including live attention indicators and post-submission summaries for entire classes. Individual student analytics and broader activity analytics are highlighted.

Activity creation and use tips • 35:24

• Sparky customization is discussed, including adding a persona to tailor interactions and guiding questions. The approach emphasizes concise prompts and specific roles to shape feedback and language.
• Lower school use cases are shared, highlighting rotating facilitation, group work, and station rotations with Flint. An example from Harker School shows engaging editing and enhanced student collaboration.
• The speaker explains how activities can be created for teachers and students, including templates and libraries. It is shown how to duplicate, edit, and reuse activities for lesson planning, writing, grading, and more, with examples of weekly slide tasks and a Buzz-themed haiku workflow.
• A practical demonstration follows on creating and managing an activity, including naming, adding a weekly topic, generating images, and writing haikus. The process evolves to adjust prompts, reuse sessions, and refine content over time for ongoing, hyper-customized assistance.
• A summary is provided about analytics and student grouping. It explains how to view analytics for a group and how the AI can assist in analyzing students across activities, with caveats about AI limitations and the need to verify data. It ends with a note inviting feedback on the feature and potential improvements.

Educator shareout • 47:34

• The teacher shares how third through fifth grade designed AI-focused activities using grants and resources. It is explained that activities advance from understanding AI basics to ethics and environmental considerations.
• Rooban introduces himself as a primary school teacher from Malaysia and describes his journey with Flint, highlighting challenges for B40 families and starting with small, playful AI activities for younger learners. Personalization drives activity design and outcomes, enabling instant generation of varied practice levels. It also supports learners by offering extra challenges or practice as needed. Daily routines and events are tied to the platform, including warm-ups, story creation with student names, and ongoing examples of inclusive, engaging learning. It highlights impact on teacher preparation time and classroom variety.

Conclusion • 59:14

• Lulu concludes the session and highlights the plan for upcoming campfires.
• Lulu also shares QR codes for people to check out the Campfire Calendar, Flint's Instagram (which has a bunch of teacher-facing content), and the Flint Community.