AI Lift Off
A hands-on AI education program bringing real classrooms into the age of AI — four space-themed sessions for Years 7–10, mapped to the WA Digital Technologies curriculum and facilitated through WADSIH.
Overview
AI Lift Off is a school incursion program that brings hands-on AI education into Western Australian classrooms. I created the program and facilitate it through WADSIH — the WA Data Science Innovation Hub. It grew directly out of my Gen AI Bootcamps, taking the same practical, build-it-yourself philosophy and rebuilding it for the school context.
The program takes a distinctly practical approach: students don't just hear about AI, they build with it. Across four modular sessions they train their own image classifiers, program AI assistants in Scratch and Python, code on a custom platform, and reason through the ethics of real-world AI systems. Every session pairs concept with construction, grounded in the kind of thinking the WA Digital Technologies curriculum asks of students at this stage.
A space and mission-control theme runs throughout — students work their way through the Launchpad, the Access Panel and Mission Control, coding in the Block Console and Python Console along the way.
Program structure
Modular sessions, built for Years 7–10 and mapped directly to the WA Digital Technologies curriculum. They can be delivered as a complete program or selected individually based on a school's needs.
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Train & Investigate
Students build and train their own image classifiers to discover how machines learn from examples.
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Generate & Compare
Prompting, evaluating and comparing the outputs of generative AI — and probing where they break.
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Code & Create
Programming mini AI assistants, from Scratch and Python to a custom Blockly-based platform.
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Design for Good
Applying AI thinking to a real-world problem, with ethics and impact at the centre.
What students do
Every activity is something students make, run or test themselves. Across the program they:
- Build and train their own image classifiers, and investigate why they sometimes get it wrong
- Program mini AI assistants in Scratch and Python
- Code on a custom Blockly-based platform, moving between the Block Console and the Python Console
- Experiment with the Reachy Mini robot to see first-hand how a system prompt shapes an AI's behaviour
- Explore AI ethics through real Australian and international case studies
Inside the mission
Supporting resources
Alongside the sessions, I built a set of teaching resources that give the program depth and keep it grounded in evidence.
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AI impact calculator
Shows the energy, water and carbon cost of AI prompts — backed by independent, peer-reviewed sources only.
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25 ethics case studies
Real cases across 8 categories — bias, hallucination, privacy, IP, malicious use, regulation, environment and education — with a teacher answer key.
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Industry research briefings
On AI adoption across Australian industries and what WA employers expect from entry-level workers.
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UN SDGs × AI
A resource connecting AI to all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Curriculum alignment
Every session is mapped directly to the WA Digital Technologies curriculum, with content structured by year level (Years 7–10). The program addresses content descriptors across data representation, computational thinking, algorithmic design, and the evaluation of digital systems — making it straightforward for teachers to integrate AI Lift Off into their existing scope and sequence.
Status
AI Lift Off is running as a free pilot in Perth high schools across Terms 1–2, 2026. In parallel, a teacher professional development program is in development so that classroom teachers can deliver the sessions themselves, with full platform support.
The program is also being extended to Years 5–6 and adapted for remote and online delivery — broadening reach without diluting the hands-on, build-it-yourself approach that defines the experience.