Sign In / Register
Students in Stanmore Bay School are progressing their writing, with a little help from artificial intelligence (AI).
Teacher Justin Maclaren says he started using AI images in class this year, after he saw his teenage son using the technology.
“It looked fun and inspiring,” he says – and that is exactly how it panned out with his Year 4 class.
The students were writing descriptions of characters from Medieval times (things like dragons, goblins and ogres) and Justin input those descriptions into the Bing AI Image Creator programme to generate pictures of how the characters could look.
He says it was not straightforward – some of the first images fell short of what the children had imagined and further work was done until they were happy.
The students themselves say it was a creative, fun process, even though some found the images creepy and even scary.
“It was exciting to see them come off the programme,” one student says. “Not just mine, but everyone’s.”
Recently Year 5 and 6 teacher Vicky Zhu applied the same programme to her students’ studies about animal adaptations.
They were imagining, and writing about, hybrid animals that combined their favourite adaptations from real animals.
She says that seeing the AI images generated from their writing, and working to make them match what they had imagined, inspired the children, and even those who struggle with writing were very motivated to do more.
“It’s important that it’s their own writing, and only the images are from AI,” she says. “In the past they did their own drawings too, but this works for those who don’t like drawing.”
Vicky has shared the work with a Year 1 class, and she says those students are now combining their own drawings with AI.
While the teachers are well aware that there are a lot of questions and concerns around what AI might become, and how humans can keep control of it, Justin says that its limited and controlled use as a tool, the way it has been at the school, has been only positive.
Sasha Levshina finds the image of her Fish Queen quite scary. Francesca Godderidge’s design of a Hound Dog Mistress was one of the hardest to create to her satisfaction.
