Yoda, ELIZA, and a Year 7 bigram model
Kieren Xiang is a pre-service teacher I met at the ICTENSW DigiTLL conference back in March, where I’d run the usual pen-paper-and-dice bigram activity. On his pract he ended up teaching a run of lessons on AI—and large language models in particular—to Stage 4 (Year 7 and 8) students at a lower-SES public high school in Western Sydney. The middle section of those lessons was his own adaptation of the website materials and the bigram generator I’d demoed at the conference. He wrote to tell me how it went, and it was too good not to share.
Kieren adapted the activity by replacing the children’s book with a Yoda monologue from The Empire Strikes Back. Around ninety seconds of dialogue gave the class just over fifty words to work with. Yoda’s distinctive speech also gave students something to listen for in the generated text.
Each group took responsibility for one or two words and filled in that part of the bigram table. The class combined everyone’s sheets into a shared model, then generated new text from it. Kieren used the activity to teach probabilistic text generation and the effect of training data.
As a contrast, Kieren introduced ELIZA—Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1966 chatbot—to show what “natural language” AI looked like when it was concretely programmed rather than learned from data. He even built a bigram model derived from ELIZA as a warm-up before the Yoda tables.
The students loved to hate her. ELIZA’s canned, deflecting replies frustrated them so thoroughly that, as the class was winding down, they asked to keep going—determined to get her to actually answer a question.
Kieren had no formal training in AI, but colleagues began turning to him for help. He was invited to talk to senior classes about machine learning and LLMs.
The students enjoyed the ethics discussion more than the dice-rolling, which I hadn’t expected. Most arrived with strong, mostly negative views about LLMs: job losses, energy and water use, deepfakes. A few shifted over the lessons from “purely bad” to “useful, but still could be bad”. Kieren reported much more enthusiasm for LLMs among the teachers.
Thanks to Kieren for adapting the materials and letting me share his account. If you’ve adapted them for your own classroom, I’d love to hear how it went—get in touch.