Computer Skills

Beginner

60 mins

Teacher/Student led

+80 XP

What you need:
Chromebook/Laptop/PC or iPad/Tablet

Your AI Copilot — Prompting AI to Do Better Work

Learn to use AI assistants effectively as a Drafter, Critic, and Explainer on your own work. Master prompt patterns that get genuine results: being specific, giving a role, showing examples, and iterating. Practise on a piece of your own work.

Warning: Your screen size is quite small for viewing this. Rotate your device into landscape mode if you can.

1 Introduction
2 Key Concepts
3 Step-by-step Task — Three Modes, One Project
4 Common Issues
5 Your Turn: AI Workbench
6 Reflection
7 Lesson Summary
Quiz

1 - Introduction ~5 mins

Illustration for Introduction

Welcome

In the first lesson of this course you met four kinds of AI model, and since then you have trained your own models and used them in games. The AI assistants in this lesson are the generative kind: they make new text, pictures or code when you ask.

Today you learn how to drive an AI assistant. Assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini can genuinely speed up real work (drafting an opening line, critiquing a draft, explaining a concept you can't quite teach back), but only if you prompt them well and decide for yourself what to keep.

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

Use an AI assistant in three useful modes: Drafter, Critic, and Explainer
Write prompts that get specific, useful output instead of generic filler
Decide what to keep, change, or reject from an AI response, and explain why
Recognise when AI help crosses into academic dishonesty
Apply the same patterns on ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or Gemini, whichever your school supports

Warm-up

Think for 30 seconds: the last time you asked an AI assistant for help with something real, was the first answer actually useful, or did you have to rewrite your prompt to get anything you could use? What did you change the second time?

👇 Mark your steps as done as you complete them.

+5 XP

2 - Key Concepts ~5 mins

AI assistants aren't magic. They're good at some specific things and bad at others. The five ideas below are what separate a wasted 10 minutes from a useful one.

Read this first: the bold sentence in each row is the one-line takeaway. If you only remember five sentences from this lesson, make them those five.

Concept	Why it matters	Example
Drafter mode — ask AI for a first version that you will then edit	A starter draft is always easier to improve than a blank page. Editing someone else's attempt also teaches you what "good" looks like.	Ask AI to draft three alternative one-sentence hooks for a pitch about a TY bake sale to help fund the Galway trip
Critic mode — paste your own work and ask AI to find specific weaknesses	You spot your own mistakes more easily when someone names them out loud. AI is a patient, free critic available at midnight before a deadline.	Paste a paragraph you wrote yourself and ask AI to name three sentences that are unclear and say what would confuse a parent reading them
Explainer mode — ask AI to explain a concept at the exact level you need	If you can teach something back in two sentences, you actually understand it. That is the difference between freezing and answering confidently when someone asks you about it.	Ask AI to explain "break-even point" at Junior Cert business level, distinguishing fixed costs (for example, table hire) from variable costs (ingredients), with a worked euro example
Prompt specificity — vague prompts give vague output; specific prompts with a role, an example, and real material give usable output	The gap between "help me with my pitch" and a draft you can edit is about 30 extra words in the prompt.	"Help me with my pitch" produces generic waffle. "Act as a school communications coach. Rewrite this opening in 25 words for my year head: [paste sentence]" produces something usable.
The honesty line — AI as support is fine; AI doing the work you were asked to do yourself is dishonesty	Critique, explanation, and draft-to-edit are support. Submitting AI output as your own is cheating. The rule of thumb: if the point of the task is that you learn the skill, AI can't do it for you.	Using AI to critique your own draft is support. Pasting an assignment brief and submitting the AI's answer unchanged is dishonesty.

👇 Mark your steps as done as you complete them.

+10 XP

3 - Step-by-step Task — Three Modes, One Project ~17 mins

You'll take one rough pitch sentence through all three AI modes (Drafter, Critic, and Explainer) using a sample TY bake sale for the Galway trip as the worked example. Then, in your AI Workbench in step 5, you'll apply the same three modes to a piece of your own work.

+15 XP

4 - Common Issues ~3 mins

Common Issues

Prompting isn't a magic formula. Here's what to do when it isn't working.

Issue	Solution
The AI gave me generic waffle that doesn't help	Your prompt was probably too vague. Add a role ("act as a …"), the real material (paste it in), and a constraint (word count, audience, level). Don't restart; refine the prompt you just sent by adding the missing piece.
The AI is confidently stating a fact that sounds wrong	AI hallucinates. Every factual claim you plan to use in your work must be checked against another source. If you can't check it, don't use it.
The explanation is still too confusing to teach back in two sentences	Ask one narrow follow-up targeting the exact part that confused you, for example, "I didn't get [X]; can you explain that bit with a different example?" Don't ask for the whole thing again from scratch; iterate.
AI is refusing to help or showing a warning	You may have framed the request in a way the tool reads as sensitive. Rephrase with the purpose clear (school work), the audience clear (my year head, my class), and the constraint clear (one paragraph, Junior Cert level).
I typed the prompt but the AI is still answering as if the placeholder was part of my question	Scroll back and check you deleted the `[paste your chosen sentence]` text (brackets and all) and replaced it with your own sentence. If not, send a new message: "Ignore my last message. Here is the real sentence: …" and paste your sentence cleanly.

+10 XP

123learn · Online learning platform

Unlock the full learning experience

You're previewing this lesson. Get full access to this lesson and hundreds more — each one ready to teach, with interactive activities, printable resources and pupil progress tracking built in.

Hundreds of curriculum-aligned lessons

Interactive activities in every lesson

Printable resources & progress tracking

Get started

Copyright Notice
This lesson is copyright of Coding Ireland 2017 - 2026. Unauthorised use, copying or distribution is not allowed.