AI training for an international school in the Algarve

The situation

An international school in the Algarve. Teachers of children from age 4 to 18, all in one room, with very different levels of experience with AI. A year earlier I had run their first AI session, about what AI can do for the teacher. This year the question was harder: what happens when AI is in the students’ hands, and how do you redesign a task so the thinking stays with the child.

What I built

A 90-minute in-person session with one strict rule: it must never become a tools tour. The core is four moves a teacher can apply to any task. Shift the output. Anchor it local. Feed, do not finish. Show the working. One move is enough.

Group work ran by age band, 4 to 6, 7 to 11 and 12 to 18, with printed cards. Each group handed back three lines only: the original task, what changed, and what the child now has to do that AI cannot.

The session also had an app. I built it in Lovable in one day, without writing a line of code by hand. Teachers pick a real task, pick one move, rewrite it and submit it to a shared wall. Then an AI tries to fake the new task on their phone, as a stress test. The build itself was part of the lesson. Anything that turned the session into a demonstration of tools was cut.

The result

Thirty-five slides, ninety minutes, one app built in a day. The design puts the staff to work on their own tasks instead of watching a demonstration, which is the whole argument of this site applied to a school.