Some Wild Ideas

Questions worth asking about education

Latest

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AI & Critique
Reflection · Building

August 2026

Building with Papert at My Elbow

What a Chatbot Built From Seymour Papert's Writings Wouldn't Let Me Get Away With

I pasted my dashboard's system document into a chatbot trained on Seymour Papert's writings and asked what it thought. What came back wasn't encouragement. It was a colleague who could see exactly where the build would die.

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Access & Restriction
Policy · Provisioning

July 2026

The Software Nobody Needs

What We Lock Away When We Lock the Devices Down

Three students built tools nobody else needs today. Not one of those projects survives a locked-down device — and across staffrooms, board papers and newspaper columns, we are busily talking ourselves into locking them down.

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Computation & Data
Year 7 · Interactive

March 2026

1.3 Million Kids vs. The Internet

A Computational Roast Born Over Morning Coffee

When Australia's NAPLAN test crashed nationally, one educator saw a lesson plan. Two prompts, one coffee, and a fully interactive data visualisation that roasts the failure with mathematics, the Taylor Swift Ratio, and a server meltdown simulator.

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Fieldtripping with AI cover

March 2026

Fieldtripping with AI

When the Tools Don't Exist, Build Them

The tools I needed didn't exist. So I built them. The entire digital infrastructure supporting a week-long school trip — a native iOS staff app, a GPS boundary system, a real-time scavenger hunt platform — was designed and built not by a software development team, but by me, their teacher, working in partnership with an artificial intelligence.

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Design & Making
Year 7 · Classroom

February 2026

A Chaotic 80 Minutes

When Learning Looks Like Mess

A Year 7 design lesson that looked like chaos. Students prototyping with AI, sharing discoveries across the room, and building a working multilingual translation tool for refugee families — all in a single lesson. Messy, loud, collaborative, and deeply human.

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February 2026

Leading Learning in the Age of AI

Moving Beyond Anxiety Toward Amplified Human Creativity

Research warns that AI can diminish the cognitive work required for learning. But these findings reveal what happens when AI is used poorly, not what happens when it is used well. School leaders must move beyond anxiety toward a vision of AI as a partner for exploration and creativity.

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AI & Learning
Research · Leadership
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Library & Data
Practice · Innovation

January 2026

Leading Learning in 2026

Rebuilding the Library, Reading the Data, Rethinking What Matters

We rebuilt our school library as a digital learning ecosystem for the age of AI. Then we started watching how students actually use these tools, not to police them, but to understand what good AI-supported learning looks like in practice.

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