Brett Moller needed tools that didn't exist. So he built them.

Australian educator Brett Moller was about to take 35 students on a week-long field trip to Melbourne. He had some thoughts about tools that would make the trip go smoother and might even be a little fun! So Brett — a classroom teacher, not a software developer — designed and built a native iOS staff app, a real-time GPS boundary system, and a live scavenger hunt platform. Thirty-five Year 9 students used them. The tools ran without a single failure.

He built them by describing what he needed in plain language to an AI, which translated his understanding of the problem into working software. When staff members walked into a restaurant with a group of students, the allergy and dietary information for every student was one tap away on their phone. When students had free exploration time in a city of five million people, they carried a live GPS map showing their position, the hotel, the emergency meeting point, and a boundary that turned red if they wandered outside it. When the scavenger hunt went live, seven teams dispersed into Melbourne and submitted 83 photos and videos over three hours while staff scored them in real time. Zero upload failures. Average review turnaround: 2.2 minutes, keeping the scavenger hunt exciting.

One of the features — the GPS boundary system — wasn't even planned. It was conceived while Brett was demonstrating the platform to a colleague mid-trip, prototyped on his iPhone while standing on a busy street corner, and fully deployed that evening. From spoken idea to working tool: hours, not weeks.

Brett knows things that no software vendor could understand: how allergy or medical information can get lost in the excitement, where to draw the line between safety and experience, and how to find reasons to celebrate every student discovery. That knowledge plus an AI assistant made it all work.

Brett wrote up the whole story — the tools, the process, the pedagogy, and the security architecture — in a detailed white paper that is free to download. It's one of the most practical and philosophically grounded accounts of what becomes possible when educators stop consuming educational technology and start making it.

​Read about and download Field Tripping with AI here​

What should we take from this?

Not that every teacher needs to build an iOS app. Although — and we mean this — you can.

The deeper lesson is about agency. Brett didn't wait for a vendor to solve his problem. He said, in effect: I know what my students need, I know what my staff need, and I'm going to make it happen. That posture — teacher as maker, teacher as problem-solver, teacher as the person most qualified to design the tools that shape the experience — is what changed everything.

And here's what's easy to miss: when teachers model that kind of agency, students notice. When you say out loud, in front of your class and colleagues, "I have an idea — I'm not sure it'll work, but let's find out," you are teaching something that no curriculum document has ever captured. You are showing what it looks like to be a learner. To take a risk. To build something that didn't exist before.

Brett's students knew their teacher had built the tools they were using. Think about what that communicates — not just about the trip, but about what teachers are capable of, and by extension, what they are capable of.

The question isn't whether you can do what exactly what Brett did. The question is: what's the thing you've always wished existed for your students? Because the distance between that wish and a working tool has never been shorter.

Speaking of creative uses of AI for education...

Brett borrowed a phrase from Ken Kahn to describe what he experienced building those tools — AI not as a tutor delivering answers, but as a "learner's apprentice," an intellectual ally that amplifies what the human already knows. It's a precise and important distinction, and it comes from Ken's new book.

​The Learner's Apprentice: AI and the Amplification of Human Creativity, published by Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, is Ken's account of what AI partnership actually looks like when it's working — and what it makes possible for learners of all kinds. If Brett's story made you curious about the bigger ideas underneath it, or if you would like to see hundreds of other examples of creative uses of AI, this is the book to read.

Reflecting on the use of AI

Ken has also been posting regularly on social media about his continuing experiments. In a recent post, he fed the book's text into Google's NotebookLM to generate artifacts — infographics, podcasts, slide decks, even flashcards! — and wrote honestly about what came out. Some were genuinely impressive. Some weren't. It's a candid and useful look at what these tools can and can't do, and the changes in this tool over the past three years.

​Read Ken's post: Impressive (but flawed) tests of Google's NotebookLM.​

More soon! In the meantime, let's all go make something...

Sylvia Martinez & Gary Stager
Constructing Modern Knowledge