📅 AI Monthly — May 2026 · AI Basics Refresher
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Session 2 of 4

AI Monthly · May · Session 2⏱ 25 min · 👨‍👩‍👧 Parent present

💪 Sharpen Your Prompts

Take your best Starter-era prompts and make them dramatically better.

🎯 Today's goal: Apply everything learned since Starter to improve prompts you wrote when you were just beginning.

🔥 Warm Up

Warm Up

"You wrote prompts in your first AI sessions. Today you look back at them — and you will probably be embarrassed by how simple they were."

"That is a good sign. It means you have improved."

🤖 The Activity

Main Activity

If you saved any prompts from your Starter or Explorer sessions — use those. If not, your child writes 2-3 simple prompts from memory as examples of how they used to ask questions.

📋 Type this exactly
Here are some prompts I wrote when I first started using AI: [paste or describe the old prompts]. Analyse them. What is weak about them? What are they missing? How would a more experienced AI user write these differently?

Your child reads the analysis. Do they agree? What did they miss that AI spotted?

📋 Type this exactly
Now rewrite each of those prompts using: (1) a clear role, (2) specific constraints, (3) the purpose or audience stated explicitly. Make each one significantly more powerful than the original.

Compare the old and new versions. Run both. Compare the outputs. The improvement should be visible.

🧩 The Twist

Go Deeper
📋 Type this exactly
What is the single most common mistake that beginners make when writing prompts? Give me the top 3 beginner mistakes and a before/after example for each.

Ask: Which of these mistakes did you make when you started? Which do you still sometimes make?

🛡️ Safety Moment
“Don't use AI to do your homework”

Better prompts get better results — but better results are only valuable if you have genuinely understood them. The same rule applies whether you are a beginner or advanced: AI explains and helps, you understand and do.

💪

Prompt Sharpener Badge 💪

Took beginner prompts and transformed them using advanced techniques

👨‍👩‍👧

Parent Notes

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What they learned

Metacognitive growth — seeing your own development and building on it.

Questions to ask
  • How different were your old prompts from the new versions?
  • Which technique made the biggest difference?
  • What prompting habit do you still want to improve?
What to watch for

The before/after comparison is one of the most motivating exercises in the programme. Children seeing their own improvement is genuinely energising.

Safety in context

This session can surface the "AI did my homework" concern indirectly — if old prompts were used for schoolwork, they may come up. Use it as a natural conversation.

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