# Year 7 workshops at UNSW

> Three LLMs Unplugged workshops for Year 7 students from UNSW Gateway schools, at the invitation of Henry Hickman.

Thanks to [Henry Hickman](https://www.unsw.edu.au/staff/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](https://www.unsw.edu.au/content/dam/pdfs/gateway/unsw-gateway-partner-schools-2026.pdf)
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](https://www.llmsunplugged.org/lessons/how-ai-writes-stories-ledger/).
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](../../assets/images/unsw-workshop-counters.avif)

![Two students' hands tracing rows of a ledger sheet, one holding a pen over a notepad of generated words](../../assets/images/unsw-workshop-ledger.avif)

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](../../assets/images/unsw-workshop-shareback.avif)

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?).

![A hand-drawn poster asking "On a scale of 1 to 10, how much did you learn in this session?" and "how much fun did you have?", with coloured star stickers clustered towards 10 on both lines](../../assets/images/unsw-workshop-star-chart.avif)

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](https://www.llmsunplugged.org/about/#get-in-touch).