Year 7 workshops at UNSW

Ben Swift · 22 October 2026

Thanks to Henry Hickman and the UNSW team for hosting us on Thursday 22 October, and to the teachers who brought their classes in. Two members of the LLMs Unplugged team, Ben and Cole, went up to Sydney to run three workshops, each with about 30 Year 7 students. They came from schools in UNSW Gateway, a program that partners with high schools across NSW. Henry, a lecturer in UNSW’s School of Computer Science and Engineering, invited us and organised the day.

We ran the ledger version of How AI Writes Stories. Each session ran for 45 minutes, which is tight for the full activity. Students tallied word pairs from a picture book onto their ledgers, then generated new text by drawing coloured counters from a cup.

Students' hands on a table of colour-banded ledger sheets, one pointing at a row while another holds a paper cup beside a scatter of blue, green and yellow counters

Two students' hands tracing rows of a ledger sheet, one holding a pen over a notepad of generated words

Each session finished with a shareback, a chance for groups to show the room what their models had generated.

Ben, in a green t-shirt, grinning in front of a slide headed "Shareback" that shows a crowd of speech bubbles above simple silhouettes

Students also rated the session out of ten for learning and for fun, with a star sticker on each scale. All three groups shared the one chart, so it holds the whole day’s responses. Most of the fun stickers are bunched at the “a lot of fun” end and a handful sit in the middle. A couple landed on “no fun at all” (Year 7s, amirite?).

Henry wrote afterwards that he’d “heard nothing but great things”. With more than 60 schools in the Gateway program, we hope this is the first of several visits. If you’d like to run a session like this with your students, get in touch.