Revised Session Outline:
1. Introduction: Why Prompt Engineering Matters (5 minutes)
First I will explain the shift from AI consumers to creators; introduce promptathons as competitive/collaborative learning experiences that develop critical AI literacy skills. For engagement, I plan a quick show of hands poll: "How many have tried AI prompting?" "How many feel confident in your prompting skills?" "How many have taught prompting to students?" This serves to acknowledge varied experience levels and frame promptathons as accessible to all skill levels.
2. Prompt Engineering Foundations (7 minutes)
Next I will give a brief overview of effective prompting principles: clarity, specificity, context, role assignment, output formatting; demonstrate good vs. poor prompt examples. I will show side-by-side comparison of outputs from weak vs. strong prompts on same topic and ask participants to identify what made the difference.
3. Play AI Promptathon: Round 1 - Warm-Up Challenge (10 minutes)
Participants will experience their first promptathon challenge in small teams (3-4 people). I provide an image and they have to come up with a prompt to replicate the image as closely as possible. Teams work together to craft prompts, test them with AI tools on their devices, and refine based on outputs. Teams collaborate to write and test prompts (6 min).
Quick gallery share in Padlet: 2-3 teams share their best prompts and resulting outputs (4 min)
4. Play AI Promptathon: Round 2 - Increased Difficulty (12 minutes)
Content: Second challenge with higher complexity. In this round, I ask participants to get AI to generate a part of a story that includes a specific phrase. Teams apply lessons from Round 1 and share results to the Padlet. Here we introduce a competitive element: teams vote on most effective prompt from other teams.
5. Play AI Promptathon: Round 3 - Coding application (12 minutes)
In this round, teams code a game that uses both their character from round 1 and their narrative from round 2. There is maximum autonomy here as teams design prompts to code their game based on their own creations! They can post their game links to the Padlet if they get to finish their code completely.
6. Facilitating Promptathons in Your Classroom (10 minutes)
In the wrap up section, I give practical guidance for implementing promptathons with students: setting up teams, scaffolding for different age levels, creating age-appropriate challenges, managing competition vs. collaboration, assessing prompt quality, and building prompt libraries.
If time allows, I will also include small group discussion (by grade level/content area): What challenges would work for your students? What modifications would you need?
After this session, participants will be able to:
1) Facilitate a promptathon activity in their own classroom, including establishing rules, forming teams, selecting appropriate challenges, and managing the competitive or collaborative structure.
2) Design prompt engineering challenges appropriate for their grade level and content area, scaffolding difficulty from beginner to advanced prompting skills.
3) Evaluate prompt quality using specific criteria such as clarity, specificity, context provision, and effectiveness at achieving desired AI outputs.
4) Create a collaborative prompt library with their students, organizing effective prompts by purpose, subject area, and complexity level for ongoing classroom use.
5) Articulate how promptathons develop critical thinking, problem-solving, and AI literacy skills while shifting students from passive AI consumers to active, skilled creators.
AI Optimism: A guide to redefining artificial intelligence in education, by Becky Keene
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/promptathon-its-time-we-gamified-way-work-genai-siddharth-joshi-ydbtf/
https://www.tcworld.info/e-magazine/education-and-training/promptathon-exploring-generative-ai-through-collaborative-learning-2
Back
Trips and Tours
