My "Beat the Bot" Activity

How I encouraged my students to think about "offloading" with a simple, in-class activity

NOTE: The following activity was designed for a specific set of students under specific circumstances. I created it because of past feedback from students. I designed it to make it easily replicable, but it will play differently for different audiences.

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I recently ran an experiment.

I designed an activity for my Writing and Research students at Berkeley College.

I had two goals. I wanted to:

1. Encourage my students to think about descriptive detail.

2. Appreciate the risks of “offloading” our writing tasks.

To put this slightly differently, I wanted everyone to both think about descriptive writing as a specific skill and to see the value of writing in and of itself.

And above all, I wanted to do this in a way that kept my students at the center of the process. One of my gripes about AI-infused activities is that they marginalize student voices.

(This is why I push against activities that offload the first draft of something to an AI program, so that students can critique and evaluate it. It's a useful exercise, but it puts AI firmly at the center: AI is the first mover. That activity sends the exact message I don't want to send.)

Anyway, that is the logic behind my activity.

In the rest of this essay, I will share what I did.

I want to give you an in-class activity they can adapt and replicate. But I also want to give you a sense of how I think and process.

The activity is far from perfect. This is a first iteration. (Or, if I decide it’s no good, then it’ll be the final iteration.)

I’ll include reflections about how I might change the activity, along the way. At the bottom of this article, I’ll also include a Google Doc link. Feel free to take the activity, adapt it to your own purposes, and share.

Without any further ado, this is what I did.

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The Activity

(At the bottom of this article, there’s a Google Doc with the basic steps. Feel free to use it!)

Step #1: Campus Walk

My students are coming from many different spaces.

Some are popping into class before work. Others just dropped off their kids. Others spent the morning taking care of a sick loved one.

Their stories are wildly varies.

So, step #1 is to welcome everyone to a shared space. Movement is a powerful way to set the stage for “embodied learning.” And after all, descriptive writing is embodied writing.

For this reason, we walked out of the classroom. I asked students to spend 3-5 minutes walking around the building.

Their task? Find something they'd like to describe.

It could be a physical object. A person. An event. A sound.

When we got back into the room, we shared and wrote the options on the board.

The final selection: a cookie (Welcome Back cookies were on a table towards the front of the building.)

Excellent. That'll do.

Step#2: Get into Teams

I had 16 students. So, I took out a sheet of paper and wrote down the numbers 1-4 four times.

I wanted to do it with real, physical paper. I wanted students to see me do it, and hear the paper tear.

Again, engaging all of our senses is the goal.

I moved a desk to the middle of the room. I placed the sheets of paper face-down.

I asked students to:

1. Come pick up a piece of paper.

2. Look around the room for others who have the same number.

3. Get together with that team.

I went to each team and gave them a sheet of paper and a few pens. I said, “These are for your team. They're you're shared objects.”

Likely, you've been reading enough to see what I'm doing here.

Movement. Embodied learning and experiences. Inhabiting the same physical space.

Step #3: Expand on Our Cookie Sentence

This is when I set up the activity.

I wrote on the board: “I ate a cookie.”

I told students, “This is our sentence. You have your team. Working together, write out a descriptive story around this idea. Approach it however you want.”

Go.

We went around the room and shared our creations.

My students got excited as they read.

Step #4: Start the Bot

At this point, my students were firmly at the center of the process.

I brought up ChatGPT on the laptop projector. (Up until this point, I made sure to keep all of that technology off.)

If you run this yourself, I highly recommend:

1. Using GPT-4o (which our students have free access to)

2. Disabling Custom Instructions (they often give students false impressions of what ChatGPT can do out of the box).

I ran this prompt:

You are an expert describer. I am going to give a sentence, and you are going to write it into a description.

Use whatever details you want. Add context if you want.

Make your rewrite short. NO MORE THAN 5 SENTENCES.

Here's the sentence I want you to rewrite: "I ate the cookie."

My goal wasn’t to teach prompt engineering. I didn’t want to do anything that gave ChatGPT all of the attention.

This is what ChatGPT produced:

The soft, chocolate chip cookie melted in my mouth as I savored each bite. Its sweet, buttery aroma lingered in the air, tempting me to take another. Crumbs fell gently onto the napkin as I indulged, the rich chocolate oozing with every chew. It was warm, fresh from the oven, a perfect mix of crisp edges and a gooey center. The moment felt like a small, delicious victory.

Now, my students and I had something to work with.

Step #5: Run It Through Eleven Labs

This is where I ran into an issue, so I pivoted.

I teach college. But still, asking students to read from the screen in real-time lessens the impact of what we’re doing.

Some students cannot see the board. Others need a bit more time to read and digest.

This is why I used Eleven Labs.

With program, I can insert text and convert it to a real-sounding voice. (I use the free plan.)

I pasted the text there and converted it to speech. That way, everyone could listen.

We compared ChatGPT’s creation to our own.

Step #6: Beat the Bot

At this point, my students have written their own description. They’ve also seen how a bot approaches the assignment.

Now, my students try again.

I simply tell them to use what they’ve learned to improve the description.

How they do it is up to them.

Quick Clarification: The goal isn’t to write something better than the bot, in a sense. The goal is to try. Even if ChatGPT were to be made 100x better tomorrow, I think this exercise would still have value. What matters is that we’re doing our own writing vs. handing off writing to a program.

Step #7: Reprompt the Bot

At this point, the activity mostly runs on autopilot.

I went into ChatGPT and gave the simple instructions: “Make it better.”

Again, my goal here is to specifically not focus on prompt engineering. I want to make any message to ChatGPT short and sweet, since I want my students at the center.

We look at the output and compare it to our own.

We ran out of time at this point. But we couldn’t have kept going.

Step #8: Let’s Talk about “Offloading”

This is where we chatted.

We talked about the exercise.

I asked them if anyone had heard of “offloading.” One student had. She defined it as “When you give something you don’t really like to someone else.”

That was something I could work with!

We circled around a question: “Why should we do our own writing, even if a program like ChatGPT could create a good output? What’s the point?”

In other words, “What is the point of writing?”

This sent us into very interesting spaces. My students talked about using writing to figure things out. They talked about the quiet that comes with reading and writing. They talked about how the sentences created by ChatGPT were good, but also felt foreign.

They felt no ownership over what ChatGPT created.

That’s when our class ended.

Step #9: Fill Out the Exit Ticket

This is something new I’m trying.

I asked my students to take out their phones. I brought up a QR Code on the board. They scanned it and sent in their answers.

This took about 3 minutes.

My goal is to:

• Reach students who might have been too shy to talk in class.

• Continue the discussion outside of the classroom.

• Learn about what my students thought or struggled with.

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Reflection #1: What I Would Change

If I did it again, I would change a few things:

1. I would lay out the objective of “Beat the Bot” a little more clearly. That way, it’s less about competing with AI and more about using the activity to think about what it means to own our voice.

2. Leave more time for reflection. We really got into it, with looking at ChatGPT’s output. I’d like to shorten that a bit, and really lean into the reflective part (about offloading).

I’m sure more ideas will come up as I reflect more.

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Reflection #2: My Environmental Impact

Any essay on an AI-infused class activity would be incomplete without a reflection on the tools we used. And one of our tools, ChatGPT, uses a lot of energy and water.

I use the phrase “a lot,” because companies have made it very difficult to identify how much energy and water were talking about here. As with many things AI-related, it's a world of cloaks and daggers.

It should be no surprise that companies that dedicate their time and energy to creating “Black Box” technologies would leverage some black boxes of their own.

Throughout this activity, I tried to be mindful of how much energy we are using. That’s why I:

1. Did this as a shared, guided activity.

2. Gave ChatGPT instructions on limiting its output.

At the end of our discussion, I also talked to my students about it and made them aware of exactly what we were doing and why.

I know it’s not ideal.

But it’s my way to limiting my environmental impact while also helping my students develop AI Literacy.

A Google Doc with the Activity

You can click here to get the basic instructions.

Feel free to adapt it to your own students and context!

Images are below.

Images from the activity