Campfire Session — Exploring our May 2026 Updates
Campfire Session — Exploring our May 2026 Updates
Explore Flint’s May 2026 updates, including activity folders, multidimensional rubrics, multimedia generation, and more.
Teddy Lane, Customer Success Engineer at Flint
In this Exploring our May ’26 Updates Campfire Session, we walked through Flint’s newest product updates and explored how teachers can use them to build more organized, multimodal, and personalized learning experiences.
The session combined live feature demonstrations with broader discussions around AI pedagogy, classroom workflows, assessment, multimedia creation, coding, and evolving questions around how students interact with AI tools like Sparky.
Content covered in this session includes:
- Activity folders allowing teachers to structure activities similarly to Google Drive folders using drag-and-drop workflows.
- Discussion around extending folders beyond classes into “My Activities."
- Multi-dimensional rubrics as a more flexible grading workflow, enabling teachers to evaluate student work across multiple competencies simultaneously.
- Rubric customization and teacher control, showing that teachers can edit Sparky-generated rubric categories, scoring structures, and feedback after AI grading occurs.
- Multimedia generation from a single prompt, demonstrating how one activity can now produce several outputs at once.
- Documents with embedded AI-generated images, making it possible for teachers to create visually rich instructional materials directly inside Flint.
- Whiteboard annotation workflows, where teachers can annotate generated images, diagrams, or geometry figures directly, then ask Sparky to revise or regenerate materials based on those annotations.
- Slide generation as a multimodal teaching tool, with examples including character analysis, quote reviews, flashcards, and recap presentations.
- Video generation as a reflection and feedback mechanism, where Sparky can narrate explanations alongside visuals to help students revisit quiz performance, reinforce misconceptions, and engage with content in more accessible formats.
- Coding directly inside Flint, allowing students to run code, debug errors, and receive guided support from Sparky without needing to leave the platform.
- Examples of teachers using Sparky for quiz generation and study guide creation, particularly for final exam preparation.
All activities shown are available in the Flint Public Library, so you can duplicate them and make them your own!
Slides from the presentation can be found here.
Got more questions, comments, or feedback for this topic? Feel free to raise them within the Flint Community.
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Introduction • 00:00
- Teddy Lane, a former high school teacher, recently joined the Flint team.
- The team attended the ATLIS conference in Columbus last week, meeting independent school leaders and educators.
- Flint is prioritizing in-person engagement, with team members aiming for monthly school visits.
Ice-breaking news • 06:30
- Sparky, Flint's AI character, was introduced about a year ago and has become popular among students and teachers.
- A question arose regarding whether Sparky should remain a personable character with a face or become "faceless" to avoid blurring lines between a chatbot and a companion.
- The team's view is that companionship stems from AI responses, not its appearance, citing ChatGPT as an example of a faceless AI with which students have developed relationships.
- Sparky is designed to be a strict teaching assistant, not providing direct answers, despite its friendly appearance.
- Plushy versions of Sparky are currently in production and will be sent to schools in the coming months.
New features • 13:40
Activity Folders
- Allows teachers to organize activities within classes, similar to Google Drive folders.
- Supports drag-and-drop functionality for easy organization.
- Can be used for various organizational needs, such as grouping lessons by topic (e.g., exponents, quadratics) or by student groups (e.g., debate teams).
- The folder structure will remain intact when classes are archived or moved to a different term.
- A request was made to extend folder functionality to the "My Activities" level for personal organization and sharing with other teachers without student access.
Multi-Dimensional Rubrics
- Enables grading across multiple categories (e.g., mathematical accuracy, work shown, grammar, synthesis of material, voice development).
- Categories can be customized and assigned numerical values.
- Sparky can generate rubrics and provide quick summative assessments, saving teachers time.
- Teachers can edit Sparky's rubric feedback and scores for individual students.
Multimedia Generation
- Allows for the creation of multiple media types (e.g., slides, images, worksheets, flashcards) from a single prompt.
- Example: Generating a fraction worksheet with visuals and questions, along with flashcards.
Images and Documents
- Sparky can generate documents with embedded images.
- Teachers can replace AI-generated images with their own historically accurate or preferred visuals.
- The whiteboard feature allows users to annotate images, download them, and then prompt Sparky to make changes based on the annotations.
Feature recap • 24:56
Slide Generation
- Slides can be used for character recaps, personality traits, key quotes, and flashcards.
- Encourages interactive and multimodal lesson building.
Videos
- Provides immediate, visual feedback to students on quizzes or assignments.
- Features Sparky narrating content with visuals, promoting reflection and deeper learning.
Coding in Flint
- Students can now run their code and receive immediate feedback.
- Sparky guides students to understand errors, building a strong foundation in syntax and computer science.
- Supports differentiation, allowing coding activities to be used in various subjects like health class for data analysis.
Q&A session • 32:50
- Chat Functionality: Initial issues with chat access for external users were resolved during the meeting.
- Archived Chats: A request was made to allow teachers to access and continue using chats from previous grading periods, as current chats are hidden.
- AI Behavior: An instance was reported where Sparky's "sub-agent" went rogue during writing generation, which the team will investigate.
- Essay Grading: Sparky can assist with grading essays based on a provided rubric and offer feedback, though it requires feeding essays one by one.
- Math Accuracy: Sparky's math accuracy is still a concern; it is recommended to upload a perfect answer key for grading to ensure correctness.
- Lecture Creation: Sparky is effective for creating lecture templates and generating good examples, though some editing is required.
- Quiz Generation: Sparky can create new versions of quizzes with similar problems, saving time for teachers.
- OneDrive Integration: A user reported an ongoing issue with connecting OneDrive, receiving an error message about failing to fetch user drive information.
- Study Guides: Sparky is being used to plan weekly study guides for students preparing for final exams.
- Science Map Questions: Sparky can generate images like graphs or system drawings for science questions (e.g., life science, physical science, earth and space science) that students can analyze for multiple-choice answers.
- Geometry Drawings: Sparky can generate geometrical drawings based on prompts, with the ability to refine them using the whiteboard annotation tool.
- Rubric Reports: A request was made for a single report summarizing rubric scores for all students in a class, rather than individual student views.
- Flint for Public Schools: A user inquired about using Flint in a public school district that does not currently subscribe.
- Access to almost all teacher features is available.
- SIS/LMS integrations are not included in the free version.
- The 80-student limit can be circumvented by creating multiple workspaces (e.g., "Section A," "Section B").
Have a use case you'd like us to cover in a future Campfire? Reach out and let us know!