The More-Human Classroom: When Grade 9 Students Became the Teachers
What if students didn’t just learn about AI, but used it to teach the whole school?
That’s the question I gave my Grade 9 Digital Design class. We didn’t start with instructions, we started with imagination. They used AI to build their own vibe-coded games, chatbots and teaching videos, then went into classrooms and taught younger students about digital citizenship and staying safe online. It’s the most engaged I’ve ever seen a class. The whole unit was built around five human capabilities we wanted to grow, not replace: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, compassion, and communication.
In this hands-on workshop, you’ll start where they did. You’ll play the games my students built, then I’ll show you exactly how we made them. You’ll learn the workflow from a rough idea in Gemini or Claude through to finished, ready-to-teach lesson resources in NotebookLM, arguably the most powerful teacher tool going right now. Finally, you’ll create your own, the same way I ran it across our whole staff in our AI fluency training.
No one wants an anti-human future. The point is simple: when students and teachers create with AI instead of just consuming it, the technology grows the human skills rather than flattening them. You’ll leave with the full idea-to-resource workflow and a resource you built in the room, ready for Monday, whether you set your students loose to vibe-code their own apps in Canva AI or generate your own engaging teaching materials in ten minutes. Either way, you leave ready to put students in the creator’s seat, building with AI rather than passively consuming it.
Facilitated By
Vaughn Littlejohns
Director of Technology & Innovation, Prem Tinsulanonda International School
James Abela, Director of Digital Learning and Entrepreneurship at Garden International School, combines his extensive industry experience with a passion for education.
Vaughn Littlejohns is Director of Technology & Innovation and Digital Design teacher at Prem Tinsulanonda International School, a K-12 IB school in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and founder of Littlejohns, an educator-led partnership for AI in schools. He has trained 400+ teachers in practical AI and leads whole-school implementation as a practising educator, with everything he brings to other schools built inside his own school first. He keeps the human capabilities at the centre: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, compassion, and communication, so students and staff use AI in a way that enhances learning, not one that replaces the thinking behind it. He hosts the Create with Vaughn Littlejohns podcast and helps schools move from AI-overwhelmed to confident, one honest step at a time.
