Using AI to Help Students Learn Concepts
Table of Contents
TL;DR
(Instructional Guidance, Transcript, and Prompts below)
Overview
This video explains a four-step process for using AI to design hands-on, concept-focused learning activities. The approach helps teachers generate instructional games, organize them by difficulty, extend learning for advanced students, and build assessments that reveal conceptual understanding. The transcript contains AI prompts, but these are not responded to in this summary.
Step 1: Generate Constructivist Learning Games
The first step is using AI to create a set of hands-on, cooperative, low-prep games that help students build foundational understanding of a concept. In the example, the teacher requests ten activities for teaching fractions to third-grade students using a constructivist approach. The same process works for any grade level or content area by customizing the prompt details.
Step 2: Sort Activities by Conceptual Difficulty
Once the list of games is created, AI can rank them from simplest to most complex based on the conceptual demands placed on students. This ranking helps teachers sequence learning experiences from easier introductory tasks to more cognitively demanding challenges.
Step 3: Add Extensions for Advanced Learners
Teachers can then ask AI to generate extension activities for students who grasp concepts quickly. These extensions deepen reasoning and provide opportunities for enriched exploration without replacing the core activities. The teacher can choose which activities need extensions based on instructional planning needs.
Step 4: Develop Concept-Focused Assessments
The final step is creating assessments aligned with the constructivist, hands-on tasks. Teachers can request strategies for checking conceptual understanding within a selected activity. The example illustrates using AI to generate assessment ideas for the second activity in the ranked list. These assessments help teachers observe what students truly understand about the concept.
Conclusion
The four-step process provides a practical way to use AI to design, differentiate, and assess concept-focused learning experiences in any subject area. Teachers can adapt the prompts to match their students, content, and preferred instructional approaches.
Teacher Take-aways
Pedagogical and Instructional Implications
Effective concept development is strengthened when students actively construct meaning rather than simply receive information. A constructivist approach supports this process by emphasizing exploration, pattern recognition, reasoning, and collaborative sense-making. As students manipulate materials, test ideas, and discuss their thinking, they form mental models that anchor abstract concepts in concrete experience and help prevent persistent misconceptions.
Learning is most effective when instructional tasks are sequenced from simple to complex. Organizing activities by the difficulty of the underlying concepts, rather than their surface features, allows students to develop early confidence and gradually expand their reasoning. This progression helps manage cognitive load and aligns with established research on the development of conceptual understanding.
Hands-on and cooperative learning structures further enhance conceptual growth. Physical manipulation of representations encourages students to externalize and refine their thinking, while peer interaction supports explanation, justification, and comparison of strategies. These interactions also provide teachers with embedded formative assessment opportunities.
Because learners progress at different rates, concept-focused instruction benefits from purposeful extension pathways. These extensions build on the same conceptual foundations but require deeper analysis or application in new contexts. Well-designed enrichment keeps students engaged without moving them prematurely into unrelated content.
Assessment embedded within instructional activities provides the clearest evidence of conceptual understanding. Observing how students explain, represent, or apply ideas during the task differentiates between procedural completion and genuine reasoning. This approach supports more accurate instructional decisions and helps teachers respond to students’ conceptual needs in real time.
AI Support and Use
Teachers can use AI as an instructional design partner to strengthen concept-focused, constructivist teaching while reducing planning time. AI supports key pedagogical moves that help students build deep understanding through active exploration and structured reasoning.
Teachers can rely on AI in the following ways:
- Designing experiential learning tasks: AI can generate multiple hands-on, cooperative activities aligned to a target concept. This gives teachers a wide set of options that emphasize exploration, manipulation, and sense-making rather than direct instruction.
- Sequencing by conceptual difficulty: AI can help identify which activities introduce the simplest ideas and which require more advanced reasoning. This supports a clear instructional progression, reduces cognitive load, and ensures students build understanding step by step.
- Differentiating for advanced learners: AI can suggest conceptually aligned extensions that push students’ thinking without shifting into unrelated topics. These enrichments offer deeper reasoning opportunities for students who grasp foundational ideas quickly.
- Embedding assessment within activities: AI can help identify observable behaviors, explanations, or representations that reveal whether students truly understand a concept. These embedded assessments allow teachers to evaluate learning during the activity rather than through separate tests.
By leveraging AI for these planning tasks, teachers maintain strong constructivist pedagogy while increasing efficiency, clarity, and instructional coherence. The tool supports teachers’ expertise and frees time for guiding inquiry, facilitating discussion, and responding to student thinking.
Full Transcript and Prompts
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we teach kids concepts, those principles and those ideas that underly the skills that we want them to demonstrate. In particular, because this can be such a challenge for students and challenge for teachers to teach, are there some ways that we can get AI to help with this process. And that is what we’re going to look at here.
Step 1: Generating Learning Games with AI
The AI Prompt for Learning Games
Let’s start with prompt number one.
PROMPT
I want my [3rd grade] students to learn and demonstrate concepts about [fractions]. For most of them, this is the first time they will be learning these concepts.
I need 10 ways to teach this concept with games, following a [constructivist pedagogy] approach.
The activities should be hands on, cooperative, and require minimal set up or materials. Do not use any games or activities involving pizza.
Provide the game / activity name, a brief explanation of how it is conducted, and the core concepts students can learn during the game.
So, in this case, we’re using the example of fractions at third grade. And you see right here, I want my third-grade students to learn to demonstrate concepts about fractions.
Now, what you would do is take these parts here, describe your own students, and then what is the area where you want them to master new concepts? You’re going to put that there.
Sidebar: Why Fractions are Important
The reason why I’m using fractions here comes from a conversation I had quite some years back with a dean of mathematics at one of our state universities.
We were lamenting the fact that kids often have to take one, two, three courses of remedial mathematics before they’re ever able to get to college level math, or algebra 121 at the time. And I had asked him, “What are kids missing? Like, why can’t they do college math when they get there?”
Without hesitation, he said “fractions. They don’t understand fractions or how numbers work, how we take them apart, put them together, and so on.” And that has sent me off on a quest for years. How do we help kids master fractions in particular, and generally concepts that underly those skills?
So here we’re going to be doing that and looking at third grade and fractions. That’s a quick short story about why I chose this particular example, but it’s going to work across content areas.
So, we’ve got the part you personalize there.
Use Constructivist Pedagogy for Learning Concepts
Now, for most of them, this is the first time. So, we’re introducing new concepts here. And then we continue on and say, “I need 10 ways to teach this concept with games.” We’re going to ask kids to do some heavy lifting. Let’s make a game out of it.
Put it into practice and following a constructivist pedagogy. You would put in the pedagogy that that most…works for you. So, I do think the constructivist pedagogy is the way to go, though. When we are talking about concepts and developing concepts through experiences, generally what we’re talking about is constructivist pedagogy.
So that’s why I chose that example there, but you would put in your own.
All right. Then what do we know about the activities? Hands-on, cooperative, minimal setup and materials. And for this specific example, because I’m talking about fractions, I said no more pizza. Don’t give me anything with pizza. We do too much with pizza, and it’s not really working very well, quite honestly.
Generate and Review the Learning Games
Provide the game, the name of it. Give me a quick explanation of it, how it’s conducted, and if kids are doing this, what are they actually learning?
So, that is a rather extensive prompt, but we’re going to draw from that. So, I wanted to get a lot of content in there.
All right, so let’s copy this, and let’s get it into our AI with a new discussion. So, here we go. And we tell Chachi PT, give it to me. Let’s go.
Here are 10 cooperative, hands-on, constructivist games for introducing, and then the concept (fractions in this case), and no pizza. Hurrah. All right.
What do we have? Fraction fort builders paper strip, etc. So we have 10 activities, cooperative activities following a constructivist approach for kids to develop their understanding of these core concepts. We’ve got what it is, what it looks like, and what are they learning.
So that is a great start to this strategy, this multi-step strategy. And actually, some of these look pretty good now.
So, we’ve got a bunch, but we need some sorting here because as we noted in the prompt, this is the first time kids are beginning to build their understanding. So, let’s start simply. And that brings us to prompt number two.
Step 2: Sorting and Ranking by Learning Difficulty
Prompt number two, quite a bit shorter.
PROMPT
Rank these from simplest to most complex based on the core concepts.
Rank these from simplest to most complex based on the core concepts: mot on the nature of the activities, but on the nature of what kids are supposed to be learning through these activities.
The easiest concepts, and then we’re going to build up from there as students become more proficient and are able to demonstrate their understanding.
So that is our next prompt, very simply.
All right. Ordered list…based on the underlying ideas and the cognitive load. Start easy, build some understanding, build some efficacy, self-efficacy, and then move on from there.
And now we’ve got them. Okay. So there we go: 10 ranked by complexity.
Now, that takes us then to number three.
Step 3: Create Learning Extensions for Advanced Students
Number three reflects the fact that some kids are going to move a little faster.
Rationale for Lesson Extensions
Now, we don’t really need to differentiate down because we’re kind of starting at the lowest level. We could ask for that, but we’re starting at the simplest level already. What we really need is to think about those kids that are ready to move ahead or who already understand the simple concepts, the core concepts. So give me some an extension.
PROMPT
Given that these are introductory, provide an extension strategy for each one for students who are advanced or pick up the concepts quickly.
Now here I said “for each one,” but as I’m thinking about my instructional plan, I’m going to just focus on those first few and build some extensions on those instead.
So, let’s take that, and I’m going to modify this a little bit for activities one through, I’ll say one through two for the sake of example, but I’ll probably do one through three or one through four for those students who are advanced or who just pick it up more quickly and are ready to move on.
So, extension strategies for activities one and two that provide a richer reasoning opportunity for students who mastered the basic concepts earlier.
Tips for Using Learning Extensions
And as I mentioned, going through these processes and kind of building this set of instructional activities, these games are going to work for any content area where we are teaching kids new concepts.
So let’s see extensions for advanced learners.
So here are some things we can do on top of, not in addition, not as a replacement, but in addition to what we have already done. Once students are demonstrating their understanding, what do we do to expand upon it? and that’s what this is going to give us here.
So, extensions for advanced learners, and some neat, neat stuff there.
All right. Now, finally, last one.
Step 4: Creating Assessments to Understand Student Learning
I’ve been saying yes, kids need to be able to demonstrate these concepts. I need to know if they’re getting the concepts or not, if they can understand them. So, how can I determine that?
And here I’m going to look at just one. We could do all of them, but here for the sake of this example, one.
PROMPT
For #2, provide strategies for assessing students’ knowledge.
So, let’s just say for number two of those ones we just generated, give me some strategies to assess their knowledge. All still following that same constructivist approach (and thinking thinking thinking) for the paper strip fraction towers, aligned with the constructivist hands-on…
This allows you to observe what they truly understand about this concept: here is what we can do.
Conclusion
So, there you go: a multi-step process for introducing and helping students to begin to master the concepts in the subjects that you teach.
I hope you found this useful. Take care.