Delaware students take a field trip to China using their tablets and ChatGPT

A young person is exploring Jinli Street in Chengdu, China, but there’s a twist — it’s all happening from a classroom in Delaware.

Souvenir shops and food stalls fill the street. She sees a panda doll she wants to purchase, so she asks the seller in Chinese what it costs and uses her phone to make a payment, completing the transaction.

It’s a new approach to an everyday exchange. The young person is an American 6th grader exploring Jinli Street via a tablet at Shue-Medill Middle School in Newark. Jinli Street is a photo simulation that uses ChatGPT created by local teacher Matt Saponaro using photos he took on one of his many trips to Chengdu.  

“They’ve never had any Chinese language exposure before,” Saponaro told Technical.ly. With generative AI, they can interact with the chatbot guiding them through conversational Chinese.

Along with educators Zhaochun Li and Liping Wang, Saponaro teaches the Chinese immersion elective at the Christina School District middle school, where students use generative AI to learn about China, from the culture to the language.

They use ChatGPT, on a phone or tablet, to navigate Chinese interactions and customs. For example, some modern norms in China differ from how things are done in the US, such as almost exclusively using phones to pay for things rather than cards or cash.

Even if the students never visit China, it’s a cultural learning experience that students can use to help them navigate all kinds of experiences, from travel to coding.

Building cultural and digital literacy in unison 

The unconventional class started out as a unit on China’s Mid-Autumn Festival, where students learned about the holiday’s food and mythology. Teachers asked students to use ChatGPT to assist in writing a dramatic play about the festival by asking it questions and prompting it with a theme, tone and details.

“Our students went through the script, they learned the play and then they had to act it in class,” Saponaro said. “The beauty is that they’re going to be able to do things you would not expect — you would not expect for a bunch of sixth graders to have their own script or have their own music album.” 

The “Chinese Street Food and Beijing (Peking) Opera” lesson this fall pushed the boundaries of generative AI, as students learned to use it to create music.

They prompted ChatGPT to help create lyrics based on a topic and desired details, then asked it to turn those lyrics into a song in their chosen genre, complete with vocals. They created two albums, “Wok This Way” and “Peking Beats,” mixing traditional sounds with modern beats. 

While using ChatGPT in the classroom remains somewhat controversial, nearly 60% of teachers predict that generative AI has the potential to improve education, according to a survey by online education platform Study.com.

“These kids are growing up in an environment that’s completely new,” Saponaro, who also founded coding education startup AI Whoo School, said. “If we teach what we’ve been teaching, we’re not capitalizing on that, and we’re not going towards their potential.”

AI classes aim to prepare youth for the rapidly evolving real world

Without learning about AI, students could be missing out on digital literacy skills. 

The constraints of not using generative AI in education, according to Saponaro, are similar to raising a child over the last couple of decades without exposing them to a desktop or laptop computer. In other words, it could become a foundational tech necessary to everyday life. 

So far, the Christina School District and Shue-Medill principal Charles Priestley, have been receptive to this approach. 

“For them to jump on this, they’re really taking seriously what needs to happen,” Saponaro said.

At his AIWhoo School, Saponaro starts kids using generative AI at age 4. By age 12, students are building playable multi-character games. In some cases, what his students are learning surpasses some college curriculums. 

Whether a sixth grader should be able to have the skills of an adult software engineer is a valid question, he said. But not one that should hold educators back.

“This is tech that has really changed the world,” Saponaro said, “and we need to move along and keep raising the bar.”