Resources
Practical answers, for the people who have to run this.
Short answers to the questions schools ask before and after they start. Longer pieces follow as we write them.
No prep
What a first lesson requires
5 questions
That assess any Creation
A browser
What a lab actually needs
Start where you are
Three moments schools contact us at, and what is actually useful at each.
The only question worth answering first is whether your lab will run it.
It will, if the machines open websites. That removes the step most classroom software spends a term on, and it means a pilot can start the week you decide rather than the term after. The second question — whether your staff can teach it — is answered on the teachers page, and the answer is yes without a programming background.
- Nothing to install and no lab image to rebuild.
- No AI accounts to procure separately.
- A workshop with your own students beats any demo.
Teaching AI creation when nobody on staff is a programmer
This is the most common worry, and it is misplaced. The teacher's job in an Ideora lesson is to set the problem and ask students what they are making and why — both of which are ordinary teaching. The technical questions go to Ora, which answers in language pitched at the student's year group.
The practical move is to be open about it. A teacher who says "I don't know either, ask Ora and then tell me what it said" models exactly the behaviour the lesson is trying to produce. Students explaining a technical answer back to an adult is a better learning outcome than an adult delivering it.
What "AI literacy" means when a student ships something
Being able to operate an AI tool is not literacy — it is a keyboard skill, and it dates quickly. Understanding what a system is doing, what it is likely to get wrong, and when not to reach for it is the part that lasts.
A student who has built a Creation has met all three. They have watched AI produce something that was not quite what they meant, decided what was wrong with it, and looked inside to find out why. That is a more durable form of literacy than any amount of prompt practice.
Assessing work when every student built something different
A mark scheme built around a single expected artefact does not survive contact with thirty different Creations. The good news is that the interesting evidence is not the artefact anyway.
Look at the decisions: what the student set out to make, how the finished Creation differs from that, what they changed after the first version and why, what broke and what they did about it, and what they would add next. Those five questions work across any Creation, and a student who cannot answer them did not do the work — regardless of how polished the result looks.
Letting students break things on purpose
Most school computing is arranged so that students cannot break anything, which also means they cannot find out how anything works. Ideora goes the other way: the code is open, editing is supported rather than hidden, and breaking something is treated as a normal part of the afternoon.
That only works because getting unstuck is guaranteed. Every version is kept, plain-language errors say what went wrong, and there are always three ways out — undo the change, return to the last working version, or ask Ora to fix it and explain it. Tell students this at the start of the first lesson. It changes how they behave for the rest of the year.
What a computer lab actually needs
A browser and an internet connection. That is the whole list, and it is worth stating plainly because most classroom software arrives with an installation project attached.
There is nothing to install on lab machines, no image to rebuild, no licence server, and no AI accounts to buy. Students never create or hold a model API key, so there is no procurement step between deciding to try Ideora and running a lesson with it.
Before your first lesson
Genuinely the whole list. Tick them off.
That is it. There is no fifth thing.
Quick answers
Forty minutes is enough to go from a Mission to a Published Creation. Our teachers page has one worked example, minute by minute.
The first version takes a sentence and is rarely what they meant. Everything after it — deciding what is wrong and changing it — is the lesson, and it is also what you assess.
That depends on your school's own policies, which we cannot answer for you. What we can tell you is exactly what information Ideora holds and who can see it — our privacy page sets that out.
There is no finishing. A Creation that works is a Creation that can be improved, and the students who get there first are the ones who start reading the code. Ask them what is still wrong with it.
Let them skip the Mission entirely and build their own idea. Open-ended work absorbs a wide range of ability without anybody being held up or left behind, which is most of why it is worth the loss of a tidy scheme of work.
Want to talk it through with someone?
We would rather answer your actual question than write another article.