Working with Gen AI · 2026–27

How machines
handle language

Five 70-minute lessons about explicit rules, counted patterns, and learned prediction — and about the judgement a person still has to supply.

The spine: rules → counts → learned prediction, with fluency is not accuracy carried across all five days.

Every lesson runs the same four parts: a warm-up question, the lesson activity, an in-class reflection and Classroom submission, and a preview of the next lesson. The decks carry the lesson; the two-page handouts are reference sheets, not required worksheets. Decks include teacher notes and need no downloads, accounts, or logins.

The five lessons

01

Who writes the rules?

The cat problem, Bletchley Park, ELIZA, and a model you train in three minutes.

02

Why did ELIZA ever work?

It doesn't fool you. In 1966 it fooled people who knew how it worked. Why?

03

BookBot: generating from counts

Nobody writes a rule about what to say — only a record of what followed what. What comes out?

04

Explore LLMs: same task, different models

Which differences can you actually defend from evidence?

05

Your investigation, on one page

Can you put a claim and its evidence where a stranger could check you?

Materials

Printable worksheets

All five lessons, two pages each. Print at 100%, double-sided, no scaling.

Poster templates

Blank six-zone layout to print, plus the two worked examples used in Lesson 5's warm-up.

Running the decks

navigate N teacher notes F fullscreen Home End first / last slide

Each deck is a single self-contained HTML file on a fixed 1920×1080 canvas that scales to any projector. Nothing is stored, transmitted, or logged — no analytics, no accounts, no student data.