AI in Practice Games, Lessons & Videos
I used AI to make familiar learning moments more dynamic and engaging. AI opened up formats I couldn’t have produced before, while I still decided what students needed to learn.
ProcessAsked for interactivity, then went back and forth until an activity had real potential to engage students and still carried the instruction.
I used AI to prototype four distinct classroom interactions, then refined the content, mechanics, and visual treatment for how students would actually use them. In class, these ran on the platforms students already used; the versions here are web rebuilds of the same activities so they can be played on this page.
Sort 20 pieces of evidence into the North or South against the clock, building a streak as you go.
I took a strong but dense three-page overview from New York City’s Passport to Social Studies curriculum and used AI to turn it into a narrated video, then created a matching transcript with embedded questions. We watched it together in class and paused for comprehension checks.
The source pages the video was built from.
The transcript carries the same narration in print, with the comprehension questions students answered at each pause.
So, how do you build a nation from scratch? Today, we're jumping into the incredible story of the United States Constitution. And it's a story that starts, funnily enough, not with a huge success, but with a massive failure — one that almost tore the new country apart before it even had a chance to get going.
Okay, let's just start with this pretty wild fact: America's very first government was a total disaster. Imagine winning a revolution against the most powerful empire on Earth, only to find that the country you just fought for is already on the verge of complete collapse. That's exactly where the founders found themselves because their first blueprint for a nation was deeply, fundamentally flawed.
You have to remember, right after declaring independence, the founders' number one priority was to create a government that was the exact opposite of the powerful king they had just kicked out. This whole first attempt was born from a very real, very powerful fear of centralized power. Their first shot at a rule book was called the Articles of Confederation. Coming fresh out of a brutal war with a king they saw as a total tyrant, their main goal was just to make sure that could never happen again. So they designed a government that was intentionally, almost fatally, weak.
This really gets to the heart of the nation's early identity crisis. The whole idea of being an "American" was brand new. People didn't think of themselves that way. They saw themselves as Virginians first or New Yorkers first. Their loyalty was to their home state. And that led them to create what they called a "League of Friendship," which was less a unified country and more like a loose club where each state was basically its own boss.
As you can probably guess, designing a government to be weak started to backfire big time. The very thing they created to protect their freedom was now threatening to tear the entire country apart. You could say the cure was becoming way worse than the disease.
The transcript continues through Part 5, pairing each section of the narration with the questions students answered at that pause.