How AI writes stories at Duffy Primary

Ben Swift · 2 June 2026

Last Tuesday we took LLMs Unplugged into a Year 5 classroom at Duffy Primary School (around 35 students) for a lesson we called How AI Writes Stories. The session came about through the ACT Academy of Future Skills, who’ve been helping us get these materials in front of students and teachers across the territory’s public schools.

Most of our workshops so far have been with teachers, education professionals, or high-school students. Duffy was our first session with upper-primary students, and we weren’t sure how they’d find the model-building activity.

Duffy Primary Year 5 students seated facing the front of the room as two facilitators present a slide headed "Writing"

We ran the cutouts version of the activity: students sorted word cards into buckets, then built new sentences by drawing cutouts one at a time.

A worksheet bordered with cut-out word tiles framing a passage of handwritten text the students generated from their model

The students asked why the model sometimes produces nonsense, where the “creativity” comes from, and what changes if you feed it a different book. Some of their questions made us think, too.

A student holding up their handwritten workshop notes, headed "Cybernetics"

Thanks to Pip Hall and the Duffy Primary team for having us, and to the ACT Academy of Future Skills for making the connection. There are already more primary schools lining up. If you’d like to run something like this with your students, do get in touch.