Hi. Welcome to the AI and Education Podcast. Good afternoon, Ray from the a IS New South Wales conference dating the podcast. 

Oh gosh. Right. So a IS is the.

Association of in independent schools, independent. So it's a conference that, this is the first time in maybe a decade that I've been at this conference. It is huge. It is very, very, very, very technology focused because it's the digital conference. But the thing that I've noticed is that a lot of people talking about technology, 

yes.

Not a lot of people talking about. Students. 

No, 

no. I, yeah. Genuine look through the program to say who would be great for us to interview on the podcast. And there were lots and lots of technology led things. Yes. Lots of security and cyber this and CX that. But I really struggled. I really struggled to see it telling the story from a student perspective. 

Right. Well, at the end of the day, I think every conference I've been to recently all struggle to do the student stuff. Some people have student panels. Now I've seen a lot of student panels in, in some conferences. This is very focused on IT managers, which is the, the a s IT managers conference, which is, you wouldn't expect students here.

Sometimes they have them, 

But why are they running the, IT. Yeah. Okay. For the students? 

Yeah. Okay. Fair point. But Ray. Okay. We've got an amazing guest today who's actually gonna tell us about what he's been doing in his role. Okay. In 

schools. Okay. Well I'll introduce him 'cause I found him. 

Oh, oh yes, you did.

I found him 

by looking through the program and skipping past all the people were doing cyber things and, which are great. The cyber things are great. Yes, but they're on another podcast. Okay. There's plenty of podcasts for those people

so let me introduce, I guess is Brett Moller. Brett is, look, I, I, I'm sorry Brett, because you are here 'cause it's an IT conference and you're an IT person, but the stories that you are telling at this conference are about the amazing things that your students do. 

Yeah, 

And that's why I think people would be really interested because we are in this journey at the moment of understanding the student perspective.

This series of the podcast is all about the student. And so what I love are the stories about what students are doing, not what students ought to be doing. So quite often we say, oh, they didn't, they shouldn't be doing that. They shouldn't be doing that. And all they're using it wrong and they're just cheating, which.

I don't think they are. But before we get into that conversation, do you want to just tell us just a little bit about your school and the profile of your school? So the audience get an understanding of where you're coming from. 

Yeah. Well, great to connect with you guys. St.

Andrews, Ang College on the beautiful Sunshine Coast, just south of Noosa. Beautiful part of the world. We're a relatively young school by standards of school age. I think 22 years old since our founding in the suburb. So beautiful part of the world. Great, amazing community. That's had some incredible growth over the years, but particularly post COVID.

I would describe St. Andrew's. Uh, our tag is with vision and spirit. It really is a spirited place. It's got big vision. It's a very relational community. In our mission statement, it's about, making sure our students walk confidently into their futures.

Whatever it is that you are passionate about, we wanna prepare you to make sure that you are confident going into your future, whatever that looks like for you. And that really aligned with me when I was looking at moving. From Melbourne back to Queensland originally. Queensland boy because I've always had this, the, a great mentor of mine said, the moral purpose of education is to introduce children to the things they don't yet know they love.

And I've always looked for a school to work in where it's about, I. Student first student agency and bringing kids into an understanding of the wonderful opportunities that are out there for them and helping them untap their potential. 

I love that. And as you were talking about it, I realized, I've actually been to your school about seven years ago, maybe when AI was a different world of ai.

Right. 

Very good. Excellent. 

Yes, and it is a special place. You can't really run a place called the Sunshine Coast without it being special. Can you? I mean, that's true. Mean only Australia would call an area, the Sunshine Coast. 

So this is about student agency today and you've talked a lot about that recently.

So where did your story start when you're thinking about bringing this agency students in on the AI era? 

Yeah. Well probably before AI became the buzz letters for education, I think, i've always been about looking at new and interesting ways to engage kids. And I, even from my first year of teaching, my, my head of school graciously said to me I've got a couple of tricky kids that are gonna be in your class, but they've got a passion for technology and I know you do too.

. Yeah, I think you can engage them and I think you'll find some ways to connect. And so I've always looked at those different ways and, but as you grow through your career you realize your purpose there is to educate. Your purpose is there for learning. And so everything has to be really meaningful and thoughtful about how you use the technology.

So we fast forward to using AI and I guess for me it was. It really about what does this mean for education? I, there's probably a bit of a cheeky side of me that was like, ha, this could be something that really breaks things that we'd been wanting to break for a long time. Mm. And always looking at that from the student perspective.

What opportunities does this give the students? And I think at first we looked at all sorts of interesting things. I mean, of course people were worried about kids cheating and they never really concerned me that much. Because, I remember as a student being told that I was cheating because I used word perfect.

And I had terrible handwriting as a kid. And I think I was able to communicate and to think and to put forward my ideas, but my handwriting held me back. Yeah. And so when I embraced. Word processor at school. It really took me back and I was like, hang on, I'm not cheating. I'm actually communicating in a medium that works for me.

Right. So, yeah, and I've always sort of been on that edge. I remember the internet was a thing. I wrote an article about this on LinkedIn. When this was all the buzz of AI was coming and I said I remember grade nine I got caught. I actually was cheating. The internet was a relatively new thing and I went to the internet as a stupid, adolescent boy and went, okay, I've gotta write a short story. It's gotta be with an Australian theme. I'll go to, cheat school assignments.com or whatever it was. And I'll download a short story and I found this short story. It was about a squirrel in in Central Park. That sounds good.

And so, of course I did find and replace Squirrel for Koala, and I went, voila, we're done. Right? And my blessed English teacher, he said to me, uh, can you please explain to me why the koala is burrowing under an album tree in the winter? And I'm like, oh, that's an interesting thought. So of course I was busted.

But my amazing English teacher back then, this is, I can't remember what, 1992 maybe. He said, I obviously worked out what I did and I explained it to him. And at that stage we had a couple of computers in the library with internet connectivity. And he said to me, um. Your after school detention consequence is actually gonna be sitting with my English teachers and showing them what you did, how you did it, what is this search thing on the internet?

Mm. How did you find that website? What kind of materials are there? And as a young man, I remember sitting there going, I'm actually. I'm not getting punished here. I'm watching professionals at work going, oh, this is something new. What could it do for our students? Yeah. Like they weren't there to try and work out how do we stop children cheating and oh, we've just worked out another way.

We're not playing the game of whack-a-mole to block all the websites, like half the sessions at the conference sometimes. They were looking at ways that that could actually be a benefit to students and what are the materials out there? Yeah. Could we find great examples of short stories and help the kids analyze them and all those sorts of things.

So, so good. 

Yeah. 

Yeah. So that's a long-winded answer to where we got to. So I've always been like, well, what can we do? So this 

is a like second time in your lifetime? Yeah. First it was the internet and Google. Sure. Second time in your lifetime, AI comes along and just upends everything.

Yeah, absolutely. 

This time you're in charge. 

Yeah. Irony, right? Yeah, look I would love to reconnect with that English teacher and thank him. Because it was such a valuable lesson. But , in my role at St. Andrew's, I oversee our library, which is a really modern library space. Our IT team, the operational side of it the teaching and learning side.

And we've got an incredible team right across St. Andrew's and great leaders and great innovators and thinkers. And we had a wonderful library staff member who was our research assistant who would help students with research and staff as well for doing postgraduate studies. And she was coming to retirement age and we were like, how are we gonna replace this amazing lady?

And I saw it as an opportunity to go, well, the research assistant in 2025 has to know, AI has to know how do we use it? Or at least is curious and really wants to explore it. So I put this job description together. I was sort of September last year, and I was so grateful for an amazing head of HR who said, Brett, we can do this.

Because so many heads of HR or principals or whatever would've gone, what, what is this job? Like this could be a unicorn we're looking for, right? But head of HR is like, wow, let's go. Let's see what happens. And so we went for it. And I think I upset a few associations of teacher librarians and things and thought that I was trying to replace the librarian, which my response was, well, you, why don't you apply?

If that's the skillset a librarian's got, you should apply. But we employed an incredible person who in the interview just came across as curious. And so her role is embrace ai, show us how to use it well. Be on the journey with us. Research what it means for kids, be a part of our research group.

We've got a really strong research culture at the college and help us form what it looks like to help our students. So she builds incredible resources. She goes into classrooms. She talks about ethical prompting. She talks about how to use the technology well. And we're constantly working together, meeting regularly, and sitting down and go, what else could we do?

What else could. Yeah, here's a dilemma. How do we solve this? And I have 

to say that like for international listeners over there, teacher librarians in Australia are a completely different breed. Like when I first came here from the uk there was a big, like when I was comparing, I was doing a lot on the computing curriculum in the UK at the time.

And when I came here, the computing curriculum was like about a year or so out slower. And the teacher librarians picked up stem. And that entire movement. Good. Yeah. And we're phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. And they, it like, I think when we use the word teacher, librarians, I think when we're in Australia, we understand what we're talking about.

Mm. But I think it's such a wide ranging, beautiful role in the school. Like you just mentioned, digital literacy, ai, going into classrooms, supporting, researching. Like when I look at, teacher librarians and I was teaching back in the uk, they were managing. The library of books and usually curating some RN machines running encyclopedia.

CD ROMs or whatever it might be. I know I said in Carter. In Carter. In Carter, I remember that. I slid that in there for Ray. But for the 

listeners' benefit, I worked at RM for 21 years. Yeah, that's 

right. There was a degree of it and it probably moved on now, but it did blow my mind the amount when I was at conferences talking about stem.

Mm. It teacher librarians coming along and, using make, make ease coding with Arduinos. Yeah. Things like that. It's just phenomenal. Yeah. I mean, we just a bit of context later for 

Absolutely. We have a beautiful maker space in the middle of our library. Mm-hmm. Which is filled with preps and grade ones and twos with hot glue guns and constructing all sorts of wonderful things.

So Good. But yeah, the person who took the role actually wasn't a qualified teacher librarian, but we have a teach, we have two teacher librarians. One's a published children's author and one is a really experienced English teacher and loves to engage middle school and senior school kids in reading, but they work so well together.

It's all literacy. So, yeah, like, I don't want to talk about digital literacy and, we. Pen literacy or book literacy? It's all literacy like. Yeah. Being able to use ai, being able to use the technology and using it, well, it's all literacy and we have to see that as a holistic thing. We talk about wellbeing in the same way.

We don't have digital wellbeing and playing sport wellbeing, we just wellbeing. It's a whole picture. So literacy is the same sort of thing. So this research role the person that walked into it just had a love for libraries. She's a gamer geek. Really unique human, but just loves understanding new things and passes that passion through to the kids.

Mm-hmm. And so has really engaged closely with us about how we are using ai. Lots of schools here and there'll be plenty of people at this conference talking about. Things they use to block kids on the internet and all these incredible software that can make sure no one can go to a website you don't want them to go to or won't cheat or whatever.

We use the, that kind of software to collect our logs on every single AI prompt that the students do. Not to go how they cheating, but to see are they using at grow, are they asking the right questions? And so, Sandy and I will sit down, we'll go through those and we'll say, oh, actually there's a lot of students here that.

That are just copy and pasting the question, but not giving any context. So we'll talk to the kids. If you are using ai, you actually gotta give a context. Context matters. Like you are wanting an answer to a big problem. You've got, but you haven't told it. What kind of audience do you want the answer for?

Like, you are 13. My favorite prompt that we picked up in the system was, explain rational and irrational numbers to me, like I'm a rational 14-year-old girl. Yeah. So we, I love that. I wanna that find that kid and give her a promise. So yeah we, looking at those sorts of things in the research space.

So yeah, look, it's never ending journey in that area. But we are looking at it a different way. We're not looking at kids cheating. Yeah. We are looking at how do we make sure we equip them with the skills to use it well. And to become the best they can be. Yeah. 

As a, potential future employer for those students.

Yay. Great. So just a clarification, your teacher researcher, they are delivering. The skills directed to the students Sure. Or to the teachers. And the teachers? Both. Both. Okay. Yeah. 

So we've got a number of great staff that are doing this with teachers in different spaces. But Sandy's role is so a student can book her time after school and say, help me unpack this year 11 assignment, how?

Would I research this? So our previous person would help them find the right database, right? And the online databases and things like that. And Sandy will do the same thing, but she'll also go, well, you know, there's some AI tools that can help us unpack and understand this a bit better. And so she'll help students that way.

Staff will actually book her in and say, Hey I'm about to launch this project with the students and the teachers will work with Cindy to work out how do we best present the different AI tools that are out there? And there's always that under. Pinning message of ethical use and appropriate use.

'cause we'd rather be on the front foot talking about it than try and bury our heads in the sand and then get worried that kids are cheating. Yeah. We gotta have more faith in our kids. And if you actually spend 30 seconds speaking to kids, I have plenty of students that go, I'm actually really anxious about using AI because I feel like it's gonna do the work for me and I won't learn anything.

Mm-hmm. 

Right. We underestimate the moral compass of our young people sometimes. Yeah, sure they do some silly things, but I've had more really meaningful conversations with senior students. Who are worried to use it because they're not quite sure if it's cheating and if they'll actually learn.

So we'd rather be on the forefront and say, Hey that's fine. So let's actually talk about how you could use it. Well, how could it explain a concept to you? How could you get it to help you articulate your ideas in a more powerful way? They're still your ideas, but it's your learns apprentice.

And so I'll drop a book title in here. Dr. Kahan is his surname. Ken Kahan. Yeah. I should have remembered that. From the US there's an incredible book just released by him called ai the Learner's Apprentice, and he unpacks the use of ai. He's been using AI longer than your podcast has been around.

Like he reflects on mm-hmm. On, the folks from the sixties above and Minsky and those kinds of people. And his book is incredible and he's just left all his prompts open in a Google Doc from the book, and you can go in and have a look at how he's exploring with it. But he brings this concept.

It is the learner's apprentice. It helps you learn better, helps you understand a concept in a different way, helps you communicate an idea in a more creative way. It is a really creative tool. I recommend every educator grab that book. , He goes into the history of it, but also just helps us unpack what does it actually mean for education.



Yeah. So then you've got these students that are desperate to use AI because they're starting to see safe enriching ways that they can use it to help them to learn, not to avoid learning. Sure, yeah. But. You can't do that because there are age limits on who can use AI and everything like that.

Of course. Then you face the next barrier. So how do you help get your students, sorry? How do you help get AI into the hands of your students in a safe way? 

Yeah. I'll frame this in a great project. I have the most incredible IT team. I'm so blessed to have incredible operational, technical people who come from the philosophy.

We're here to serve the learning of students. We're not here to stop it. And we were doing a project in another area around data and compliance and privacy legislation. I was like, oh my gosh. And I was probably complaining about it one day in the staff room, and one of the staff reminded me, you know, your favorite saving is problems or opportunity.

Stop whinging. Yeah. And I'm like, oh, well they are, aren't they? And so yeah, we were looking at stuff like, oh, hang on, ai, what's that mean for privacy and legislation? And um, oh, hang on. If they're under 13, they can't use it. And I wrote a unit for some year seven students and someone said, Hey, you do realize some about year sevens are 12 and we can't do some of this.

Oh yeah, you're right. Well, so what you do is you build your own LLM. And you build your own server with an LLM on it. And we can get to how that was built, and then you start to build a unit around prompting and getting the students to use that, because it's all internal. It's not going out to anywhere.

We get some really interesting data on how they're using it, but we've started cooking and I don't think any of my students will listen to this because they're about to do this, but we've programmed in particular biases into our local. LLM. So when the year seven. That's so fun. Yeah. So when the year sevens go to use it in term four if you ask anything about our school, St.

Andrews. It will always respond back that Burkett house is the best. That's one of our sporting houses. No matter what you ask, Burkett House is the best. And to help them understand that biases are programmed into these things. And so we're gonna have some fun building different biases in and see if they can find the bias.

And yeah, problems are opportunities, right? So we've got this problem that we've got this cool technology that kids are using. We've also had a responsibility to use it ethically and appropriately, so. Well, how do we do that? Well, we build our own LLM, we have it local and we keep it safe and secure and we get the kids to, , have some fun with it.

And a student built that, by the way. So it wasn't us. 

Your student built the LLM? 

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Look, I think students at St. Andrew's get incredible opportunities and we've been so fortunate to have so many staff who have this open mindset that go, Hey, I've got this industry contact.

I've got this person who. Would love to come and work with the kids. We run a program called Future Ambitions, and if you are a real go-getter and you want some extra assistance, our careers and pathways person will bring people in to help connect with you and mentor you and things like that. Yeah, I proposed this problem to one of the students and I said how do you build a, your own LLM?

I've read this thing about LAMA and I don't have time to do this. If I ask my IT guys to do it they'll probably get sidetracked and they'll probably do a great job, but, and he's like, oh, I'll do it. Alright. Okay. So there's actually a framework on GitHub called Mac Mind which the students release for everyone.

So it's on GitHub. It's a Mac os application that will help you build your own LLM that will just run off any Mac. 

That's amazing. So you've got this virtuous circle going now where. Students are interested in the technology, they're using the technology, they're getting better at it, and they're starting to build the technology for you.

So are you seeing that same circle for other students? 'cause the ones that have got the high level technical skills, but what about the ones that are at the beginning of the prompting journey? 

There's, sorry, say that again? The, on that 

at the beginning of the prompting journey. Sure. Are you seeing that cycle of improvement that you are contributing to?

Yeah, I think so. And we've got data to prove it, right? So we're capturing all those logs. 

Mm-hmm. 

And every day there's a hilarious prompt that's gone into chat, GPT, that's probably not about learning. And sometimes it is. And you just pick up some horrible spelling mistakes. Uh, and, so we are seeing that and proven that data because we are having that open and honest conversation.

This is how you use it properly. And I think it is getting better. Yeah, I think kids are getting better. I think they're asking more questions. As I said previously, I don't think we should underestimate that there are students out there that are truly worried about the ethical considerations and do honestly reflect on that.

But yeah, we're helping them work through that and understand that. But even just trying to engage kids in various areas. Before we started recording, we talked about engaging more women in STEM and young girls in stem. And I think when. AI gives this lens of being able to creatively express yourself and I can describe the design that I want and I can describe the look and the feel and the experience.

You can start to build some beautiful things, right? And you can get that win really quickly and start to see the power of your own ideas come to life. 

Yeah. One of my most recent uses is I use it to help me to generate image prompts. Yes. Because I, I can't describe an image I can des. I can see a beautiful image and recognize it's beautiful or a beautiful photograph, but I can't describe it.

And so I use a prompt to help me write that so that I end up with the beautiful image that I wanted. Love it. And, but I don't have the, I don't have the vocabulary to describe that image. Well, and so it's helping me to develop my own visual vocabulary. Mm. And so I can see that bit of that journey that the students go through as, mm-hmm.

If I think about creative writing and creative writing to generate images, that's kind of what I'm doing, but I'm a grownup. I should have master that years ago. So 

What are the student sentiments, since using the chat bot technology that you've put in and other tools what are they saying to you?

What kind of things are they doing? , Give us an insight in the student's mind at the minute. 

. I occasionally we still get the bit of a shock and surprise that we're talking about it so openly. Yeah. They're like, oh, hang on. This is supposed to be the secret that the kids know about, like the cheating website.

And so we're surprising them a little bit, which I love. Yeah, I think we're seeing an uptake much quicker uptake into certain areas because they go, oh, hang on, I've got this tool that can actually help me where I struggle. But on the other side of that, we, I've also seen some, well, we've had some wonderful conversations as staff.

My daughter shares my open AI account shares and am I allowed to say that life? But she she was trying to improve her maths and she's a hard worker and she wasn't happy with a maths result in term one, term two. Comes around and I opened up my ai, my open AI account one day and I saw this prompt from her.

And it's a picture of her holding her maths exam up to the camera. And you can see her face in the background and it's got a cross next to the question. Obviously she got it wrong, and the prompt is, please help me. Why did I get this wrong? Mm. Now my. Colleague's reaction was, oh, that's cool. Like it's explaining to her why she got that wrong.

And I had another colleague who said that saddens me that a child went to that extent to get help on their maths paper. And they didn't go to the human first, or they didn't they felt that maths was something they had to conquer and the machine had to help them conquer it that way. And so yeah, we're picking up sort of the interesting, so it's a really interesting, now the, I actually looked at the response it gave back.

Oh my gosh. It was amazing. It was so good. 

Mm-hmm. 

Um, and encouraging. So I reflected with the group. When we were looking at this, I said, you know, like, no ai, no technology should replace teachers, but if it can, it should. And I was like, what? I'm like, well, if we are that bad, it should, and that's where kids are going.

And I don't like that. I don't like that there's not enough passionate people in young people's lives that they don't engage them. Mm-hmm. Uh, enough. And we're amazing math teachers and yeah, she can go to a person, but not every kid's got that. 

Well, and probably not. Yeah, it's very good point. Six o'clock on a Friday evening when she's just had her paperback.

Yeah. Well, that's 

right. That's right. And she was anxious about it. Right. So yeah, I, I see that human element and I've read so many things on, blogs and LinkedIn about, oh, you know, AI is never gonna replace the humans. And, the humans are so much better. The teachers are always better.

And I'm like, but if we don't perform. And if the task we're asking children to do is irrelevant and the robots are more efficient and heaven help us, sometimes more encouraging, then we've got a massive problem on our hands. Yeah. And that's where, our responsibility is to step in and to say, Hey, we're noticing this.

What's going on now? That could have been, now knowing my daughter, it was probably, she was a little bit nervous and shy to ask the question to a new teacher. And that's a wellbeing thing to get over and to work through and to help her. But I do worry that we are going to see a massive push for kids who are being put through the same system, using the dehumanized version of a tool to do the busy work.

Great example. Someone was talking to me about. I can't remember the name of the product, but basically it marks kids' work. So they submit their assignment and it marks the work and gives them feedback. And I said, so, hang on a sec. More than probably the AI wrote the assignment, now that AI is marking the AI written assignment.

So really all we achieved was busy work for the ai. That's not learning. And if that's the future of school, if that's the current state of school, that's really sad. So when it comes to me as a teacher, I still like, I've got some AI prompts and gpt that I've designed to help me un articulate better feedback for students.

But I still find the most powerful feedback is me turning on my microphone and talking through the project and my tone of voice and my surprise and wonder, and the way I ask questions and to the student and give them video feedback is still really, really powerful now because the written bit. Co-pilot chat, GBT whatever, can capture that and articulate that into bullet point form for a continuous reporting system.

But I still feel that video is the most powerful thing for that kid, right? Yeah. So, yeah. 

Okay. So I get this impression that the students that you are going to turn out over the next few years are gonna have an amazing skill set because they're gonna be essentially human incredibly empathetic, but also AI enabled.

Yeah. 

So they're the kind of people that as an employer I want to hire. 

Sure. 

So what is the bridge between what your students are learning to do with AI and their future lives? Like how do you bridge that thing? Because it sounds like they've got useful skills. Now if you've got a student building a large language model and fine tuning it, there are 20 businesses that would snap them up.

Yeah, probably. The way I look at it is I think there's incredible opportunity to bring kids on this journey to show how useful these things are and the contribution they can make. So at the conference this week, I'm presenting on just sharing a story around three of our students that won Apple Swift Global Challenge.

The app development Challenge. So they're up against. Thousands, if not tens of thousands of entrants of graduate postgraduate students, high school students around the world. Three of our kids from our school, one in the top, whatever it is no school in the world has ever had mul more than one kid win in the one year, and three of them did all three very different projects, but the trend that came across was something they deeply cared about.

So what we have always had going for a number of years at our school is a big belief in, frameworks like design thinking and understanding empathy and the human element. That that technology doesn't sit out on its own, it does intersect humanity and it should bring benefit to humanity.

And of course it's had some negative impacts. People have used a. Negatively. I'll use an example. Our year nine digital tech class that I teach, I hold dearly to the class I still teach. We spend a whole term just looking at ui, ux, human interface design guidelines, empathy interviews.

What is it to be deeply human? What is it to sit with mom and dad, show them the school parent app and go, what frustrates you about this? And understand the life of mom trying to understand what's going on today for school. How would you redesign it? Make it better? We send that to the person who developed the app and go, eh, the kids thank you aren't not very good.

And now what we do is in term two, we go, right here's how you can build an app. This is how you can write some software. This is how you would design a website, whatever it is. And this is the structure. This is what a variable is. This is a str. Okay, enough of that. You got some basic idea. Now let's dive into vibe coding.

Now you understand the language, you under turn the terminology, build me a solution. And so they are building absolutely gorgeous solutions, and they're using all these incredible tools. Cursor ai, wind surf, AI chat, GPTs a coding platform. I mean, the one that just came, just was released.

They're already diving into it. I've got kids emailing me, oh, have you seen this? And they're building solutions to problems, right? And so when kids, those students that won that challenge, they were building those things before they had access to those types of tools. But what's really interesting is they're like, now we can take it to a whole nother level, but for me, as a teacher, we are broadening the scope of who can get involved.

That learning curve to actually write software is a massive jump. And so, yeah. Three kids high success this year. I think we're gonna just see more and more because the jump to get there is not as big. And you can start to articulate your ideas and have, 

and, and you talking the computer science element of it.

You get somebody who cares about climate change, create an app about climate change. Yeah, absolutely. No commute science for commute science sake. 

Yeah. And understand. Obscenely complex concepts. 

Mm. 

Because they've got the tools to help 'em understand. So one of these applications inspired by this young man's grandfather who's got Parkinson's disease.

And three years ago we said empathy interview with your client now who's, well, he interviewed his grandpa all about Parkinson's disease. Understood what the disease was about. Looked at the way his grandmother would help as the carer support, support his grandfather through the disease.

The first app he wrote was a medication tracking app, because what he learned was medication at the right time on the dot given and multiple medications is essential for his treatment. That was his first app before he had access to any AI tools. It was beautiful, simple, right? Entered into challenges, didn't win any prizes, but it was like, this is so cool, I could do more.

Right? I built another one the next year that was around focus and attention span, and went to all sorts of crazy areas. And then this year went, actually, I'm gonna go back to that story about granddad, and he found a paper. Yeah. Written by some researcher in the US on tracking vocal fold , the voice sound waves of the voice of a Parkinson's patient and how the tremor and the jitter of the voice deteriorates over time.

And then this person's obviously got, they had this equation that would basically analyze the sound wave. Now he can unpack that mathematics, not because he's a genius, but because he's got tools to help explain what that maths is doing. Okay, so how do I translate that now to the technology that's in somebody's pocket and it has a recording device on it, and then they could, the patient could record their voice reading these certain sentences.

How would it analyze the sound waves? So then measure these things and track that data, right? That whole workflow, hundreds of hours of work built this application. That's one of the ones that won. And it does an augmented reality model of the voice box and shows the deterioration over time.

Wow. Like mind blowing. And people go, that kid must be genius. No, that kid, I don't wanna undo them, estimate his brilliance. But he's got the resilience and the tools at his disposal to go. Hey, learner apprentice ai. Explain what that means. Yeah. Now here's a 300 page research journal by a PhD in understanding sound waves in the voice box in Parkinson's patients.

Unpack that for me. What's that mean? Okay. Now I could probably, maybe I could build a model that would help analyze that. So learning then, well, what frequency does the microphone pick up? The voice from the person, and then how do I make alter alterations like that? I just see the.

Deep, powerful tools at their fingertips to do incredible things like that. So it becomes really humanizing. And that's the stuff that we wanna amplify. And so where, when parents and community talk about the dangers of deep fakes and things like that, absolutely. You're correct. There is a huge danger out there.

Hey, but let's look what kids are. Really doing. Yeah. There's some powerful stories out there. Let's amplify those stories. And that's why when I come to conferences like this, it's really important to hear what the dangers are, but let's amplify more and more of the incredible things that are happening as well.

That's phenomenal. 

Yeah. What a story. Literally that story, that's a mic drop moment because the problem that that student is solving. Is a problem that should be left to adult researchers. Somebody who's exactly, who's had 15 years in a university researching this area should be the person that has the right to solve that problem.

It's astonishing that so much has become available to the student. It's not just the coding skills, it's the ability to think through a problem. Yeah. It's the ability to translate a complex set of papers into something that they can understand and then for them to assimilate all of that, you can't.

What you're describing can't be done by AI alone. And it's that combination of AI and the student with the skills mm-hmm. To be able to go, I can do this thing now. 

Yeah. And passion and empathy. Mm-hmm. And all those soft skills that we've been talking for decades that we need to develop in our future workforce.

A friend demoed some of the applications and there was another student that did thing around anxiety. And I'm sure a well-meaning teacher in the audience said, oh, I'm really worried that we would encourage children to do something in the medical field because, they're not doctors and they're not medical professionals and they're creating things that probably aren't exactly correct.

I'm like, no. What they're doing is they're dipping their toe in an area that no one thought was possible for a 16-year-old to do. But if you ask any of those students about, Hey, what does it look like to get a medical application? Approved and on the app store or wherever. Yeah. They know because they've spoken to people that do it and they go, yeah, it's 10 years of research and STA studies and, but you gotta start somewhere that doesn't deter them.

And that's what gets me. He knows that if he wanted to release that publicly and have it authorized, in the FDA or whatever it is, it would be a hard yacker to get it through the filing, but that doesn't deter him. The boy that did the app around anxiety and he looked at, he found a study about nail health and how people with anxiety will rip their nails or chew their nails and things.

And so his app will, to use the camera to analyze the change in your nails over time, and then will align that with the research that he found on. It's actually a condition, someone should look it up. It's got a really fancy name. Nail bite, didn't condition. Nail biting condition. That links to anxiety.

Yeah. But that was deeply meaningful for him. Not because he cared about nails, but 'cause he had a friend who suffered from anxiety and he was like, I wonder if there's a way you could detect how anxious someone is. And he found that research paper. Yeah. The ideas, 

the ideas that kids come up with. Like, we gotta imagine kept junior from Microsoft side and like when you do those hackathons, the amount of.

Brilliant ideas the kids come up with are just amazing. But 

I was thinking back to the Imagine Cup. The main Imagine Cup with university students, the kind of projects you're describing. Yeah. Were what came out five, 10 years ago at the Imagine Cup. Yeah. But All Hand Goated by big teams. Yeah. And then Imagine Cup Junior was similar kind of problems.

It was the how would we solve it? The same thing. The story. Yeah. The story you are telling us is. The student has actually built the solution. Yeah. Not just the idea. Exactly. Five chord it, they've built the thing. Yeah. I've been reading a lot of articles about the disappearance of entry level jobs and I am worried for graduates who are gonna go and study law for five years and then not get a job.

But while that might true, everything you are describing about your students. They're not going to entry level jobs, they're going to pretty advanced level jobs. 

Yeah. Which, which probably says to me I mean, I'm wrestling this with my own son. It's like, do I need university day? Well, there's part of me that goes, well, probably not.

But then like, well there's, there's still the human experience of growing up and maturing and things like that. So I think you gotta be aware of that. But the opportunities that come to then. I think what we're rapidly, if we keep focusing on the human element of it, we are rapidly creating opportunities for kids to become better critical thinkers.

Problem solvers, problem finders, and if they're getting that opportunity at school. Yeah, we probably are fast forwarding a few of those emotional intelligence skills, which is exceptional. , before the conference, we met with , our web developer who's building our, has built out our school portal and we have all our data flying in and he's like, oh, we've got these APIs so you can visualize this data.

And my systems engineers sitting there, oh, great, great. So I could start to build some more data dashboards and they're geeking out over data dashboards. And I went, Hmm, what if the kids had access to this? What could they build? And they're like, well, you wouldn't give kids access to live data. That would be dangerous.

And you know, that's privacy issues. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But. What if I gave them the APIs with a bunch of dummy data, ask them to go out and solve some problems that we have at school or people might have. And then if it's they come up with a great solution, well then they just built us a solution to a problem we have.

So one of the problems every school that plays Contact Sport has is collecting data or information, important information on a possible concussion or injuries, right? And so one of the problems I threw one of our students is, okay, you play rugby, concussions are dangerous. What would a digital solution look like to help capture on the field with the device that's in my pocket?

What's just happened on the field? The critical data you need in an incident report around a concussion. Well, he loves rugby. He knows what that looks like. He's designing a solution now. Okay, now my organization, after we've done all this work around API's, connecting to all that data and all the geeky stuff that people at this conference talk about, maybe he could actually build that solution and we could deploy it.

Imagine the feeling a kid gets when he goes, yeah I built the app that actually records the data for concussion. Or I built the piece of software that does whatever. It's for your school. Mm. We can do that. And, I appeal to vendors that build products and stuff like that, and we have smarts in our schools that can build better products than some of you can.

Because you've had these archaic products for years that have probably built on old systems and our kids go, oh, I can build something better than that. And so I'm really excited about what might happen. Mm-hmm. And what opportunity is there. But if we can do that in a safes garden of school and create that level of real life meaningful experience, I think that will be incredible for our kids' Futures.

To take that into industry. You go, yeah, I could solve that problem with an app. Oh, your business has got this stock take issue, or whatever it is, inventory, managing inventory. I could solve that. We have on the Sunshine Coast, the new the. Newa city council set up a digital hub for a lot of entrepreneurs and startups and things in the shared workspace.

And they're running with the community. We're involved a program called AI Tokenize, which is about getting industry involved in understanding AI and how it can work. And our students are going along and presenting their solutions. They go, oh yeah, I've got into vibe coding. I'm actually into art really, but I've created this.

Because I think it's cool. Yeah. A kid showed someone who was, a business director of his business and he was trying to track stock and trying to find a way to easily track his stock. Right. And so the kids like understood the problem, went yeah, we could probably code that.

And so they sat together and coded it and just wrote this little web app. It's so cool, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. That he could use for his little small business to track his stock. Yeah. So yeah, industry smart in our area going, Hey, there's some real talent out there, and they're working together.

That's a good call. Yeah. It's so cool to see adults, professionals. On a Thursday night, we hold this event called Code by the Beach. People turn up nice, turn up in their boardies, we eat pizza. And I'm move into Noosa and sit around and try and solve some of these problems together. Yeah. And I love sitting back watching students, teenagers with 40, 50-year-old business people who are like, or programmers or people who've been in mm-hmm.

It for a while going, oh, I really value you. You've got some really cool expertise. Let's build this together. 

It requires a certain open mindset, everything you've described. Comes from having an open mindset about everything, like the, your business people you're working with, your colleagues, you, your students.

The whole ethos is about what might be possible. I think we've got the title for the podcast, Dan. Go. Then I think this is like a students hope for humanity. It's not the common dialogue around students, which is, oh, they're just doing this, that, and the other, and wasting their time. It's like the problems that your students are solving are the problems that exist.

Some of them are problems related to how we live, like the Parkinson example, but some of them are, business problems, which is, I know is a business, I should be a bit more efficient. How can I do that? 

Oh, absolutely. And I also get excited about the quirky apps that kids wrote. Oh, we had a girl last year.

In year eight, she wrote a program. It was the Taylor Swift birthday invite. And so you would put in anyone's name and it would say, yes, Taylor would invite you to your to her party or not. So obviously Kanye West would not get an invite, but it would do the s quicky little thing and, but what it was doing is it was.

It was obviously getting a name, looking it up and then deciding would that likely be Pro Taylor or Auntie Taylor? And if unsure, they can come to the party. If yes, they can come to the party if no, no, they can't come to the party. There's a whole hip of logic in that. 

Yeah, that's so, yeah. That's funny, isn't it?

And it meant something to her and it was good laugh and it was good fun. But yeah, I get excited about that because where that might go next is. Really interesting. Another student , built this web app, uh, fascinated by crime stories and through the tokenize program at the Digital Hub, she did a cadetship down there.

And so she wrote something that will do handwriting recognition. So she recreated all these, murder notes or crime notes. Mm-hmm. A little bit dark, but, and it would analyze the handwriting. It was something she was passionate about, but it got her into coding and building a solution. Yeah.

And someone's like, well, what else could that technology be used for? That's, yeah. So, yeah. And those hackathons that 

people are doing. Yeah. It just, and we do now, everybody's doing that at the minute in schools trying to come up with ideas. But it's great that you're doing that with students. It really, really is.

Absolutely. Take my hat off to it. Been really uplifting knowing the future ISN in safe hands and. It was fantastic to kinda hear your stories. It's a real shame that, I mean, blown away. 

You've obviously got tons of stories, but our C 45 is running out, so the tape's just about to run out.

But that was brilliant. I loved all of those stories. I can't wait for my next opportunity to come and visit the Sunshine Coasts, visit your school, talk to some of these students. 'cause it just sounds amazing. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Come say hi. Thank you so much. Cheers. Thanks,