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
Vaughn Littlejohns is Director of Technology and Innovation, and Design Teacher at Prem Tinsulanonda International School, a K to 12 IB Boarding School in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He leads a human-centred approach to technology integration: policy, staff and student AI fluency, and students building the AI tools they learn with, all of it tested inside his own classrooms and school community. He has trained more than 400 teachers in practical AI. A former Deputy Principal, he holds an M.Ed in Educational Leadership and a B.Ed in Secondary Education (Technology and Applied Studies), and was selected as an inaugural Strategic AI Integration Fellow by Skilling Future. He hosts the Create with Vaughn Littlejohns podcast, talking to people who create with AI rather than just talk about it. He looks for the opportunity in AI not in efficiency but in creation: what can we build now that we could not build before?
