Ixchell Reyes (0:00): What is vibe coding? If the coding part sounds intimidating, stick around. In this episode of the DIESOL Podcast, we’re demystifying vibe coding and exploring how it can unlock practical, game-changing shortcuts for your classroom.

Brent Warner (0:29): Hello and welcome to the DIESOL Podcast, where we focus on developing innovation in English as a second or other language. My name is Brent Warner, professor of ESL, and I’m here with the wonderful Ixchell Reyes, award-winning educator in innovation and professional development. Ixchell, how have you been?

Ixchell Reyes (0:48): I am getting over a cold, so if my voice sounds a little nasal, then that’s the reason. Happy belated birthday!

Brent Warner (1:00): Thank you. Yeah, well, it’s been a while since we’ve had a show. We kind of —

Ixchell Reyes (1:06): Summer break!!

Brent Warner (1:07): Yeah, it sometimes happens in the summer, right? Yeah, we get a little summer break. We don’t necessarily announce it. You know, we had intentions of doing shows, and things happen, and life got in the way, as it should. You know, let life happen.

Ixchell Reyes (1:21): That’s how you know we’re not AI. We’re not gonna plug in our AI avatars during the summer.

Brent Warner (1:28): That we’re not consistent and reliable is a good sign of being human. I like that. (laughter)

Ixchell Reyes (1:35): Embrace the chaos.

Brent Warner (1:37): I’m going to — that’s how I’m going to start telling everybody. Every time I have a shortcoming, I’m going to say, “Hey, I’m not AI.” Yeah. Sweet. So yeah, school is back in session. I think I am on leave this semester, so I kind of have some other projects I’m working on. Just a short leave, but working on a couple other projects. And I told you before too that I’m going on this trip. So yeah, things have been going pretty well.

Ixchell Reyes (2:13): Good to know. Good to know.

Brent Warner (2:14): Besides your cold, everything okay? Anything good?

Ixchell Reyes (2:16): I recently came back from the Dominican Republic, and yeah, so I’m excited to get back into fall season. Fall season, all things fall. You can see pumpkin spice things popping up already, and the weather’s a little —

Brent Warner (2:35): You’re excited about pumpkin spice, but we should be excited about the scary movie season. (laughter)

Ixchell Reyes (2:40): Oh yeah, that’s right. I was gonna say, okay. Scary movie season coming up, football season. What else? All the holidays, all things fall. I love fall.

Brent Warner (2:51): I will say one of the things I’m looking forward to on this road trip is the changing of the leaves. So when we get to the Northeast, being able to see a little bit of the, you know, fall foliage and all that stuff.

Ixchell Reyes (3:05): So I don’t think everybody remembers about your trip. What about your road trip?

Brent Warner (3:09): Yeah. Well, we’ll talk about it a little bit later. But basically, I’m going across the country for about a month, and I’m going to be doing some camping, some overlanding, some speaking, this and that. So, we’ll get into it. But I think we’re gonna get into our topic today, which is vibe coding.

Ixchell Reyes (3:34): Vibe coding. Yeah. Okay.

Brent Warner (3:35): Okay — so vibe coding.

Ixchell Reyes (3:38): What is vibe coding?

Brent Warner (3:41): Well, okay. So first, this is a topic we’ve been holding off on talking about for a while, and it’s not because it’s like, “let’s wait, wait, wait,” but also just because other things came up.

Ixchell Reyes (3:50): The word coding.

Brent Warner (3:51): This term, I think, yeah, this term came up about a year ago, a little bit more than a year ago, and it’s really intimidating for people because that word coding is in there.

Brent Warner (4:01): Totally. (unclear)

Brent Warner (4:03): “I’m not a coder. I don’t know anything about computers. I don’t know how to do these things,” right? And it’s unfortunate. It’s an unfortunate term, because what it really does is it puts power in the hands of anybody who wants to create anything digital or online, right? And so you don’t need to know a single word of code. You don’t have to know what HTML is, what CSS is, what JavaScript is. You don’t need to know anything, right? You just need to know what you’re looking for and what you want an app to do, and you can describe it to any of these AI platforms, and they will basically build an app for you. They will build a game for you. They will build an interactive service for you. Whatever else it is that you want to do, just by your words. And so this is what it really means when they’re talking about vibe coding: it’s just the ability to build what you’re looking for in plain English, the same way that you make a picture in AI, right? If you have AI draw a picture and you say, “Hey, you know, draw a picture of a chicken in a tutu” — (laughter) obviously we’re gonna have to make that now. (laughter) So, in watercolor style, right? It will do that. And so you can kind of say something like, “Build me an app where students practice X, Y, Z,” and it will build that for you. And we’ll give it some more examples as we go on.

Ixchell Reyes (5:40): Interesting. So, why is it called coding? Is it simply because you’re asking it to code for you?

Brent Warner (5:49): Yeah. So when you actually go and do it, when you go into one of these — you know, it’s just an AI, like a chatbot — when you go in and ask it, you’ll see on the back end it says, “Okay, I’m going to start coding it for you,” right? So, in order to build apps, coding does have to be involved, but the person doing vibe coding doesn’t need to know any of it, because the AI knows all of it, right? And so —

Ixchell Reyes (6:14): So AI is actually building an app for you. When you say app, it’s not just building an image; it’s building something that you can use externally of the AI.

Brent Warner (6:26): Yeah, yes, fully interactive, and we’ll get into some of those. Today we’re really only going to talk about the basic, basic level, where you don’t have to go between different services or download files and upload them somewhere. We’re not going to do any of that stuff. We’re going to try and keep it pretty simple for the basics of the conversation. But what I do want to encourage people to understand is that you can build anything you want, right? And that is a big deal. (Sudden laughter) Hey, I knew I heard clicky-clacky in the background. So for those of you listening, Ixchell has created the watercolor of a chicken in a tutu. We’ll put that up in the show notes, I’m sure.

Ixchell Reyes (7:12): I had to.

Brent Warner (7:14): Anyways, so yeah, yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (7:16): Why would we want to use vibe coding? What is it? I guess I’m thinking, well, if I can just tell AI to do something, why would I want to do something beyond that and do vibe coding?

Brent Warner (7:33): Because AI doesn’t — well, okay, so you’re talking about just having AI do a thing, right? That’s the part where I think in a normal chat, right, in a normal chat, that is true. But as a teacher, we’ve all had it when you’re in some sort of platform, like a gaming platform. Let’s even just call it Kahoot, right? A super basic one that everybody understands. And then you’re sitting there going, “I really wish Kahoot could do this instead of that, or I wish I could customize it so that I could change this little thing and fix this and do this type of thing for my students.” And if you’ve ever been in the world of trying to reach out to these companies, you know, most of the time you’ll either get a kind response or nothing at all, right? And maybe they’ll respond. Maybe they’ll do something about it. But a lot of the time, your request just disappears into the void, like everything else. Every once in a while, we’re very happy when something useful does show up. So the whole thing about this is that you don’t have to wait for any of those things. If you have an idea, or if you have something you want your students to do, or if you’re saying, “Hey, I really wish there was a tool out there that could do this, but I can’t find it,” you can make it now, right? You can actually just make it happen, and all it takes is a few minutes of typing up your idea, and then you walk away and let it build the thing, and it will come back and it’ll look pretty good, and a lot of times it’ll be stronger and better than you had imagined it for yourself in the first place. But like with anything AI, you can also say, “Hey, it’s doing this, but actually I wanted it to do that,” right? So, “You know, it’s giving 10 points per question on this thing. I didn’t really want this to be a point-based thing. Let’s remove the points entirely,” and it’ll do that, right? So you can basically keep on adjusting it as you’re going through it. So you build, you play with it, you see what it looks like. You’re like, “Yeah, this works, but this doesn’t work.” Again, back in plain English, you go back and you say, “Hey, okay, now I want this instead of that. I want it to look this way. I want the colors to change.” Whatever else it is. It could be simple things like that. It could be back-end things, but you can fully customize it to whatever your own needs are there. So I think that’s why a lot of teachers are really gonna like it and have a lot of fun with it. I did a workshop in Chicago last month, and we spent some time doing it. And the teachers came up with such cool ideas, and it was just like —

Ixchell Reyes (10:08): Can you give us an example? I think it’s kind of hard for me right now to wrap my head around. Well, I’ve actually only seen some of the stuff you’ve made, but what is something very simple, for us to conceptualize what it looks like, what something might look like that was built using vibe coding?

Brent Warner (10:27): Yeah, yeah. I’ll show the first one. We’ll give a couple more examples later on, but let me actually share this one and I’ll talk it through. So let me see if I can find it. Yeah, here we go. So here is a gerund and infinitive challenge, right? And so, are verbs followed by gerunds? Are they followed by infinitives, or are they followed by either, right? And all the student has to do here is drag the verb. So in this case, there are kind of three buckets. There’s the gerund bucket, the infinitive bucket, and the either bucket. And above that, a verb is given, and then the student drags that to the category it fits in. So this word that’s showing up here is “remember.” And so if I say remember, does remember get followed by -ing? Does it get followed by “to” plus verb, or does it get followed by either? Ixchell, this is a test for you.

Ixchell Reyes (11:24): Both. Both.

Brent Warner (11:26): Okay, so I’m gonna drag it over.

Speaker 1 (11:29): I’m gonna —

Brent Warner (11:30): Yeah, the meaning changes, but then it says exactly right. Remember can be followed by either. Now immediately after the student does that, it says, “Write a sentence using the word remember with either gerund or infinitive,” right? And so now I’m gonna write in a sentence that says remember. I remember — oh, yeah. Go ahead. What —

Ixchell Reyes (11:51): I remember to lock the door.

Brent Warner (11:55): Okay, so “I remember to lock the door,” and then it says check my sentence, and hey, it’s giving me the little sprinkles. I got it. It works fine, and now it’s on to the next word, which is “mind,” right? And so —

Ixchell Reyes (12:09): So you’ve essentially modified something, or customized your gerund and infinitive quiz, which is something that Kahoot or another platform can’t do, because now the student is having to produce something in addition to just giving you an answer, right?

Brent Warner (12:24): That’s right. So the whole thing is, with AI — and this is what I’m trying to communicate to people, and people are starting to get it maybe, but it’s not really in people’s heads a lot — the real beauty of working with AI, or one of the really incredible things, is that you can do multi-layered interactions, right? And so, it’s not just “hey, here’s a question, here’s an answer, here’s a question, here’s an answer,” but it’s a follow-through, right? And so it’s like a first level, and you can build it all out in pedagogically sound ways, right? So first, we’re looking for recognition of issues, right? And then we’re looking for the ability to show understanding. Then we’re looking to move into production, right? And so, all of those things are steps that really show us how we’re learning and show our students, “Hey, you’re really able to do this stuff.” It’s not just multiple choice, but it’s multiple steps inside of there. So now that — oh yeah, go ahead.

Ixchell Reyes (13:25): I was gonna say, so then, could you ask it to do error recognition?

Brent Warner (13:30): Yeah, right. Exactly. So like the same —

Ixchell Reyes (13:34): So when you say multi-layered, right there, it’s gonna be different forms of the student interacting, where they’re identifying the correct — they’re physically showing you where the gerund or infinitive goes, but then they have to produce, which is harder, right? And then they’re having to recognize an error, which means they’re even thinking beyond that production stage.

Brent Warner (13:57): Yeah. So, for example, the sentence that you gave was “I remember to lock the door,” right? And it’s like, okay, that is a grammatical sentence, but it has context that’s probably missing, right? So normally we would say something like “every day,” right? Because it’s showing that it’s a habit, right? When you’re using that gerund form — or sorry, when you’re using that infinitive form, right — it’s going to be some sort of showing that that’s a habit rather than a memory from the past, right, or whatever else it is. And so then you could tell the AI to give feedback and say, “Yes, the sentence is well built, but here’s what’s missing,” right? And so you could actually go in and tell the AI to prepare for that stuff on the back end, so that when the student is actually interacting with it, they’re gonna get that little bit of bonus tips or extra feedback or whatever else it is that helps them move through their process as well.

Ixchell Reyes (14:58): Very cool.

Brent Warner (15:00): Yeah, and then of course the other big part is that students get immediate feedback on their custom work, right? And so when it’s like, “Hey, you’re just picking multiple choice,” you get the thumbs up that you’re right, great, but that doesn’t stick with you, right? That doesn’t stay inside. But when you actually get feedback and it says “yes, and you could also do this,” or “the sentence is grammatical, but what might people misunderstand about it?” Or, “Hey, you wrote about this thing, but this is not what people usually talk about when they’re talking about habits,” right? You know, some of those things. They show up, and as teachers, we do those pretty regularly. But historical ed tech doesn’t have the capacity for a million different students, a million different answers, right? And so now with AI, it can go in there, it can quickly analyze a short little sentence, and then give appropriate feedback for that as well.

Ixchell Reyes (15:53): So this sounds really cool, because you could probably customize the type of feedback they’re getting, right? You could probably go in there and feed it, I don’t know, maybe particular catchphrases that you use in the classroom. So it’s more like you, I guess. You could do that, right? Just a little creepy. For sure, for —

Brent Warner (16:13): — sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there’s all sorts of things that you can do. Again, you kind of have to play with it a bit.

Ixchell Reyes (16:22): So you have to be a really good writer of the prompts in order to vibe code. Do you have to necessarily know —

Brent Warner (16:27): Yeah, you just have to know what you want, right? And so I’ll say one thought. I just thought this was so cool. One of the teachers in Chicago, she was like, “Hey, my students are a little bit lower level. I just kind of want them drawing pictures in response to prompts.” So just like a traditional worksheet, right? Where it’s like, “Hey, I’ve got a question. Draw a picture of your living room,” or “draw a picture of a man running,” or something like that, right? And so what she did was she vibe coded that into a single sheet, and she said, “Hey, draw four boxes with little prompts above them. These are the prompts I want them to say, and then make it so that students can draw on there,” right? And so it created a little drawing thing, and she could then drag the mouse and click and drag to draw and change colors and do a couple of really basic things. And she’s like, “Yeah, okay, this is cool, but what do I do with it? Do I have to go walk around to every student’s computer and go see it?” And I said, “Well, what you can do is you can re-prompt it, so update the prompt.” And I said, “Just have it have an option to click a button to turn it into a PDF,” right? And she’s like, “Okay.” She did that. It immediately popped up a little button. She clicked on it. It downloaded the PDF that the student drew, and then they can send that in as their homework assignment. And because at the school that I was working with a lot of them are teaching online, it’s like, “Hey, well, how am I going to get access to the work that they’re drawing?” And all these other things. And so it’s like, oh, I can just give them a link to this quick little page. They can do the work, and they can get a PDF and send it to me. And so I really loved that, right? It’s just like, it doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be the biggest thing. It can just be, “I just wish I could have students draw and get a quick PDF,” and she was able to do that, right? And so I particularly am fond of the super simple purposes. Like, you know this, Ixchell, that I like the really basic apps that just do one thing well. And that is really cool, because that’s exactly what she’s doing. She’s like, “I don’t know if there’s an app out there. Maybe there’s something that kind of does it, and I’d have to work around all these things and figure out this and this and this.” I can just quickly give them a link. No logins, no sign-ins, no nothing. This is just for my students. I don’t necessarily need it for everybody. That’s great.

Ixchell Reyes (18:52): Are there any concerns, since you’re working with AI? I mean, I can’t think of any at the moment, but I’m sure that there may be some. I mean, there are —

Brent Warner (19:02): — for sure. Obviously,

Ixchell Reyes (19:03): if you’re feeding it information, or whatever you’re feeding into it,

Brent Warner (19:07): yeah. So one, all of the information you’re putting into it. So be careful again that you’re not uploading students’ information into things, right? If you do — like, I do things like I will strip student information from content that I want it to know about. So we’ve talked about this before. At the beginning of the semester, I do an interest survey for my students, and then I can take those interests and I can plug them into any of these things so that it is talking about topics that are directly interesting to my students. But I’m not putting in their names and their email addresses or anything like that. It’s just information I got from my students, but it’s not about my students. And so you can kind of wash out your students’ information before you’re using these things if you want to customize it toward your students’ needs. So if I say, “Hey, what’s your hobby?” and I’ve got 25 different hobbies, 30 different hobbies from all my students, I don’t need to put their names in there, but I know that when those students go and play the games, there’s some likelihood that the hobby thing they’re interested in shows up. So, “Oh, okay, you’re into knitting. Cool, knitting is showing up in here. You’re into dirt biking, great. Dirt biking is showing up in here,” right? So all of these different things are totally possible, and this is what’s so amazing. It takes me less effort than it does to go and research new tools, to just go have it built really quickly for me. So yeah, safety of information is one. And then the other thing to be very, very careful about when you get bigger is that AI coding is not always good coding, right? So we’re recently seeing in the news a lot of people who are like, “Hey, as a developer for a major company” — this is not me, but this was out in the news — “I was developing these things and I was encouraged to use AI, and it completely crashed the entire system for a massive corporate website,” right? And so then the programmers are like, “I’m basically moving away from AI coding now, because I can’t trust it. It can build cool things, but it has a lot of vulnerabilities.” And so probably for us as teachers, with one little simple app that does one little small thing, it’s not that big of a deal. But as you’re getting into more and more complex things that are going to require pulling data from multiple sources and reaching out to a spreadsheet for this, and reaching out — you know, like all those different things — then you’re starting to get into more possibilities for vulnerabilities. So I would say keep the vibe coding to simple and relatively accessible.

Ixchell Reyes (21:54): Beware your power.

Brent Warner (21:57): Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also, you just might not be clear about the control you have over the output that it makes for the students, right? And so, of course, you’re going to want to tell it things like, “Hey, be aware these are students who are at this level of English, right? This is their CEFR scale,” or whatever it is. But you can never totally control that, right? That’s part of the give and take with the AI. It’s like, what am I going to get? And what responses are they going to get, right? And so yeah, you can and should play with options that are school safe. We’ll talk about that a little bit later, but these are things just to be aware of.

Ixchell Reyes (22:40): Cool.

Brent Warner (22:42): Yeah, so that’s kind of first level. We’ll go into some explanations. If you’re listening in, we’ll talk you through it. If you’re watching on YouTube, we’ll show you a couple of videos of a couple more examples right after this. All right. So Ixchell, you did ask me earlier. Yes, I’m kind of going on tour. It’s kind of more of a road trip with a couple of speaking gigs in the middle of it, but we’ll call it a tour. Let’s have some fun with it. Brent’s going on tour. Tour 2020. I know — DIESOL tour. I should get shirts printed out and everything. But the truth is, as I’m looking at my schedule, I do have a couple things going on. I am bookended — oh, I guess I could say this. Definitely, I was gonna say the only one that most people could get to is the Michigan TESOL, which is on October 24. That’s kind of available for everybody, but that’s not totally true, because there’s also the bookends on both sides of it. I’m going to be speaking at LARAEC, which is the Los Angeles Regional Adult Education Consortium, which I think is on October 10th, and then I’m also speaking at CATESOL, which I believe is on November 5th and 6th. And so, anyways, if you’re in California for either one of those sides, I’ll be there. If you’re in Michigan or want to go to Michigan on October 24th, you could do that. I have a couple other little ones, but they’re kind of more private. So if you want me to come speak, it might work. But I was looking at my schedule, and I’m like, dang, I’m moving pretty quick, like from here to there to the next place to see all the things. But reach out if you’re interested. Yeah, if you’re interested, reach out. Let me know. I’d be happy to at least talk about it as a possibility. So, yeah, feel free. Cool. All —

Ixchell Reyes (24:35): — right. So, Brent, what are you using for your projects? Is it just Gemini, Claude, Copilot, etc.?

Brent Warner (24:45): Okay, so since we’re still talking first level here, I’m just gonna encourage people to consider just Canva. Not Can, not Canvas — Canva. Canva.com is our favorite little everything app, I guess. Right, it’s the graphic design and all those things. Yeah, but Canva — I’m not sure if you’re aware. A lot of people are not totally aware of this, but Canva has an AI section, so it’s Canva.com/AI. Let me bring this up here. So again, as we’re kind of looking in, you’ll be able to see a few of these. So Canva.com/AI, and actually you show right here at the bottom. So right underneath it, it’s still a chatbot prompt, but the very first thing it says is “create student activities.” Okay. So they already know, hey, people are using it for this, and I think they’ve already built in — you know, like they’ve built in —

Ixchell Reyes (25:46): You’re also on Canva Education, right? I see it at the —

Brent Warner (25:50): I am on Canva Education. So go and check and see what’s available for you. You can do these things in Gemini and different versions, right? Sharing out links. I’m just going to keep it simple, to one. I don’t want to overwhelm. But if you really want to keep it simple, you can click on Create Student Activities, and then it will — this is not my one, but they’ll give you a couple of sample options. I actually prefer the Code button. So when you click on Code underneath there, then it says, “Describe your idea and I’ll code it for you.” So, Ixchell, let’s do this live. We’ll edit out the dead time. Yes, but what do you want it to build? What idea do you have?

Ixchell Reyes (26:33): I want it to build something using phrasal verbs. Maybe I want students to select the phrasal verb, the correct phrasal verb.

Brent Warner (26:45): Okay,

Ixchell Reyes (26:46): and I want the sentence to have enough context so that there is a keyword, so that students are getting the phrasal verb and another keyword that points them to the meaning of the phrasal verb. Since, you know, phrasal verbs are so confusing. And then the first thing I want to know is, can my student recognize what the meaning is from another word, or a synonym of the phrasal verb.

Brent Warner (27:29): Okay, something like that, right? Students to show that they know the meaning from the context. So I said students have to select the correct phrasal verb, the sentence — this is okay. So I will say, to me, this is still very broad. Very, very broad. Like, what type of game do you want it to be? Okay, so yeah, that. So the first —

Ixchell Reyes (27:45): — thing, maybe, might be the first type that I want them to — can I have it select the phrasal verb and the keyword?

Brent Warner (27:57): Uh, so it’s like a multiple choice activity?

Ixchell Reyes (28:03): No, I want like a sentence where it says select the phrasal verb. Now I’m thinking, if I want to, if I can really customize it.

Brent Warner (28:09): Sentence. Yeah, let’s do it. So from a sentence, by highlighting the word. Is that what you’re saying?

Ixchell Reyes (28:17): The phrasal verb or the synonym?

Brent Warner (28:20): The — or it’s — okay. Let’s try that. I don’t know. This is still a little decontextualized. You might have said, like, “create a hangman-style game,” right?

Ixchell Reyes (28:36): My thinking’s not that developed yet, since I haven’t played with it. So that’s where I’m starting. Where people might start this way.

Brent Warner (28:42): Totally good, and that’s wonderful. That’s what I’m getting at. So I’m just kind of throwing it out there, but we should always test these things: hey, let’s see what comes up first. So, I’m gonna click on submit, and it’s gonna get in there and start building this stuff. So it already recognizes that it’s going to be coding some sort of app or some sort of platform on there.

Ixchell Reyes (29:07): My first line of thinking is I’m thinking a multiple choice thing, and then you said this is too broad, so then I thought, oh, so then I can actually try something new. So I don’t really know the limits, or my own limits are what I’m used to giving the students. Yes,

Brent Warner (29:23): and that’s totally great. Like, that’s the thing. As soon as you start playing with this, you go, “Oh, I’m only thinking inside of a little box,” right? Or, “I’m not considering all the possibilities of what I might be able to do with this.” And so there’s really a lot to play with and a lot to figure out. So I’m going to show you. It is building this out right now. While we’re waiting for it, I’m going to go over to — oh, never mind. Have to wait for more. Here it is. Well, let —

Ixchell Reyes (29:53): — me just also throw in that I’m in the regular Canva.com/ai, and it didn’t give me that button at the bottom. It just says create, or it has an image button. So I want to see if it’ll do exactly the same. But go on.

Brent Warner (30:09): Okay, so here we’ll say something like — here’s what it shows. So it says, “Click the phrasal verb in each sentence, then use the context to choose which one it is.” Right. So the sentence says, “After Maya forgot to bring her lunch money, her friend looked into her backpack and came up with enough coins to share a sandwich at school.” So we know what the phrasal verb is. It says, “What does ‘came up with’ mean here?” So I’m already kind of like, “Hey, this is not really pedagogically sound.” It’s giving the answer already, right in the second question. So, but I could click on “came up with,” maybe that would be okay. What does it mean? “Thought of something,” and check the answer. Yes, that’s right. But we see some problems with this. One is the answer to part one is given directly in part two, right? And then the other one is that we wanted people to actually drag and highlight the words, not to just click on underlined words. So I’m going to put in some text, and again, this is just plain English text, to fix that. So I’ll say, “I don’t want the phrasal verbs underlined. I want the student to drag and drop — or sorry, drag a highlighter across the words to show they have found it. Also, we don’t want part two to reveal the answer.” Oh, I didn’t see part —

Ixchell Reyes (31:49): — two. Hold on, Coach.

Brent Warner (31:50): Well, part two is the “what does ‘came up with’ mean.” All right. And I’ll actually say that here. So I’ll say, “For example, in question one, it says, ‘What does came up with mean here?’ and that gives away the answer. It could show up after students, or simply say what this phrase over–” Yes, yeah. I mean, again, we’ll play with it. So you could do whatever you kind of want to do here, and you can make these changes and make all of these updates. So there’s a little bit of, hey, what is actually happening here? What am I trying to get it to do? And so what it is going to do is then it says, “Hey, okay, now that you’ve clarified…” And again, notice that our first prompt was pretty short, right? The first thing that you said was, “They have to select correct phrasal verbs and they have to do this.” And it’s like, “Okay, well, how is it going to make that?” And so that’s kind of what it’s getting at. And so now we’re like, “Okay, hold on a second. I didn’t tell it enough.” And I think as you get more comfortable, you’ll probably give it more directions up front, so it’ll be a little bit more clear. But it will do all of this work, and then continue to build into it, or build upon it. So you’re like, “Hey, round one wasn’t that great, but I’m making it better with round two, round three,” and so forth. And so it’s going to keep on building those things. It’s saying, “Hey, now it’s coding.” It’s updating all the lines for it. It’s really quite fast to get all these things done. But here we go. So now it says, “After Maya forgot to bring her lunch money,” now it’s got “her friend looked into her backpack.” Okay, so notice that it is still opting for, hey, these are the words you can choose from, and it’s not just letting them select freely to find the answers, right? But I could still — this is still better, right? So I’m going to say, click “came up with,” right, is the answer. Then I’ll check, and then now, cool. Now it’s dropping down, and it’s like, okay, now you’ve got the answer. Now, what does the highlighted phrase mean? Oh, it means — you know, “came up with” means “found or thought of something.” Check. Exactly. That’s right. So, it’s not 100% where I want to be, but for our example purposes, and for one revision prompt.

Ixchell Reyes (34:21): So that means now, now that I’ve got the, I guess, the frame, or some kind of frame, now I can really start customizing. Now I can say, “Hey, I want all of these contexts to be in, let’s say, my student is in the hospitality field. Now I want all of these sentences to reflect language that might be used in the hospitality field.” Including — okay, cool — because I don’t want, I mean, we’re not going to want my adult students talking about a sandwich at school.

Brent Warner (34:55): Right, right, right. But for sure, like, “Hey, I have a job. I’m working at the front desk of this little company,” or whatever it is, right? Doesn’t matter. So you can totally contextualize it, but you can also fine-tune it. The best part is, you’re looking at it and you go, “Oh, I didn’t really want to do that. Okay, clarify that in the language. So I still don’t want those chosen words highlighted, like they are right now, and so I really want it where students can select, drag, and select over any of the text words in here, and as long as they’re highlighting the actual phrasal verb, then that will be considered correct,” right? And so then they have to do a deeper search. So for more beginning-level students, maybe this is good for them, to have it scaffolded, right? The scaffolded version. And for more advanced students, you’re like, “Hey, I want to pull that scaffolding away. I want them to just be able to go and do the work that they’re looking” —

Ixchell Reyes (35:55): You could also have it be like a diagnostic type where you’re giving the scaffold, but then you’re asking them a third time in a different context to identify. Because I could see, okay, my students might need it as a hint the first time, but then I want to check whether they internalized that information, and can they replicate it without the scaffolding, right? That’s what I would want to do.

Brent Warner (36:21): That’s right. And so then at the end of this — so usually you’ll probably do this for formative assessment, if you’re doing that type of thing, right? But you could, in theory, say, “Hey, once you’re done with all of this, click a button, it will take you to a congratulations page or a points page or whatever,” and you could go right back and say, “Do that PDF thing,” right? Make it so that it’s printable or downloadable as a PDF, or make it so that there’s a link to this information that you can send along to the teacher at the end. So you can really get into it pretty deep with all of this. So I just want to share that it’s out there as options. I am going to share just quickly here: so our friend Ryan O’Donnell, we’ve had him on the show before. He does a lot of game stuff, and so I think it’s okay for me to share this. He’s built a bunch of these ones. They’re a little bit more in depth, but he built classic ’80s games. So here, he’s got Frogger. He built this Frogger game, and so you click on that. It’s gonna build the game. I don’t know if you can hear the music or not, but it’s got all the music and fun stuff. But look here. It’s just like normal Frogger, except it says how many lives, and you’ve got one, two, and three. And so if you’ve ever been in any of Ryan’s workshops, he does a lot of review games where students kind of do a little bit of work, and then they get points, and then however many points is how many times they can play the game. So it’s like, oh, they got three points, so that means that student’s going to be able to play three rounds of the game before they have to start again with the reviews, right? So it’s like a little brain break, a little game, little challenges. But the real Frogger game doesn’t have that as an option. You don’t get to choose how many lives you have, right? And so it’s like, okay, just small customizations toward things like that. So I do want to just encourage people to really think creatively about these options. So maybe if —

Ixchell Reyes (38:15): — they start off with thinking, “What’s your favorite game to play? Is it something where you’re dragging and dropping? Is it something where you’re moving a little pawn across the screen? Is it something where you are advancing? What kind of game mechanics do you enjoy?” Because that’s the kind of — and then how can you now plug in your classic multiple choice, true-or-false type information into that, into the game mechanics, right? And I’m thinking in my head of people I know that might get stuck in the, “Well, I can already do multiple choice, little pop-out stuff,” but that’s not necessarily transforming the activity away from the paper version of multiple choice, except you’re going to a board or clicking, right? I can see where that might get — you’d have to sit down and play with it so that you start thinking and start feeling inspired to again think differently.

Brent Warner (39:15): And it doesn’t take long once you start going. You’re like, “Oh, cool.” And I do highly recommend if you do this with a couple of colleagues together in a room, like a lunch and learn or something like that, because then other people, you’re like, “Oh, what are you doing?” And then you’re getting good ideas from them. It’s so much fun. And so I have another — let me show. Oh yeah, yeah. Go ahead.

Ixchell Reyes (39:32): Well, go ahead and show, and then I have another question about what to do with this once it’s built out.

Brent Warner (39:38): Yeah. So here, that was actually what I was going to get to. So here’s your phrasal verb challenge as it stands in Canva. I can just click on the little export button up here at the top, and you have to do a setup one time, but you get a Canva personal URL inside of there. And so I’ve got this one that’s BrentGWarner.my.canva.site, and then it builds a subpath, and I can just say, yeah, I want to publish it right to that site. So here, it will actually make it public. I don’t have to go anywhere else. You don’t have to host it anywhere. I don’t have to host it anywhere, and so I can just give this link to you, Ixchell, and you can go and play with it. You can play the game now as it is, so I just dropped it into our chat here. But then I can do that for my students, right? I can just give it out to them and say, “Hey, just follow the link, have some fun, play with it, see what’s going on.” So that’s why I kind of wanted to start with Canva, because you don’t have to download files, upload them to another site, all of those. But you could —

Ixchell Reyes (40:38): — hypothetically then say, okay, well, I’ve got all of these student errors that I’ve collected over time from feedback, from I don’t know, maybe worksheets or online assessments that they’ve done, and I want to feed them into it. And now I want to build something around that so that the AI is also using real student errors. Can I also still then tell it, “Hey, you’re an ESL expert, and your students are going to be coming from this native language background, and they’re likely to make this error with the letter S,” or the spelling of the IE versus EI. “Can you incorporate all of that and keep that in mind?” Yeah.

Brent Warner (41:30): So I mean, it’s pretty amazing, right? So this is where it’s like, wait a second, we really are talking about a different generation of education that we’re in here, and this is where it’s like, I’ve been trying to talk to people about this for a while, and it takes some time to get. Well, you sort of have to understand it to figure out what’s —

Ixchell Reyes (41:45): You have to see it and then start. I mean, the hard part for me is visualizing it, when people say you can tell it to do something very specific and it’ll do it. Well, AI does that too. So if I don’t see it and then start thinking, “Wait, what do I want my students to be doing with that tool? And what’s the need my students have that I can immediately address and see it live?” It’s very hard to conceptualize.

Speaker 2 (42:16): Yeah,

Ixchell Reyes (42:17): very. Yeah,

Brent Warner (42:18): but also, did you see how fast these things were going as I was building them? Like quick builds, right? And I’m already, by the way, playing my —

Ixchell Reyes (42:25): — phrasal verb challenge, and I love these. So

Brent Warner (42:28): yeah, and I can build this while my students are doing something else in class, and be like, “Oh, they’re not getting this. Hold on, let me just whip something up real quick for them to interact with.” It’s like I don’t have to wait for any of these things. I don’t have to wait years and years and years to hope some developer is going to come up with this thing. I can do it literally between the time I give them one assignment and then switch them onto this one.

Ixchell Reyes (42:52): So this reminds me of an activity that one of my instructors, my pre-training instructors, did, and I know they use Canva, so this must have been what they did. They probably vibe coded something where a student had to — this was practicing making decisions, making good decisions by looking at pros and cons. And so I think that there was a list of pros and cons, and the student had to drag them into a different — they were like little boxes, but if you dragged in the wrong decision or the wrong step, there were two bombs, so the bomb would start lighting up and then eventually explode. Because he called it a — I think it was a “you have to defuse a bomb” challenge, and then they had to make decisions. And so visually, there was a timer, and they had to — I mean, again, it was a game. But yeah,

Brent Warner (43:57): right.

Ixchell Reyes (43:57): Cool.

Brent Warner (43:58): Yeah, for sure. I mean, and that’s the whole thing, right? So it’s just so cool that you can do all these things. You could flip it around to your students once you get a little comfortable with it and say, “Hey, you guys build something for me to play with, and that’ll be your homework to show me that you understand what we’re trying to do,” right? So you could play, and then could you imagine that your grading of homework is to play games that your students built? Like, that’s fun. That is cool. That’s the way I’d rather do it. Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (44:25): I’m thinking of all my teachers who now have — who’ve done these amazing warm-ups or extension activities — that they could now have a digital version that their students could play at home of that same paper-based one, or low-tech version one, but now you could really take it to a different level for our new generation. I mean, I’m not telling them about Generation Z. I’m telling you about Generation Alpha, because that’s who their students are going to be soon. You know, Generation Z is turning 30 next year.

Brent Warner (45:00): All you oldies, all you old farts. Yeah. So, anyways, if you’re interested in this, I have a short article on TESOL about it from a couple months ago. And if you just want to say, “Hey, I want to try it in Canva,” that’s great. You could do it in Google and Gemini if you have that. I think some of the other ones have similar types of things where it’s like, hey, we’re doing kind of a custom coding thing and you can get a quick link out of it. There’s a few other websites like Lovable.dev — D-E-V — and I think Bolt.new. I don’t remember. We put that in the show notes from a while back. Yeah,

Ixchell Reyes (45:38): we also had — I think it was Teacher Vibes also. Teachervibes.org has a lot of games that people have — or that teachers have built.

Brent Warner (45:51): Nice, nice. Okay, cool. So lots of things to play with there. Go explore, but hopefully this is a nice primer for some people who are interested, or maybe felt intimidated by the term, but hopefully we can kind of demystify it. That’s what —

Ixchell Reyes (46:05): — we said.

Brent Warner (46:06): Yeah.

Ixchell Reyes (46:07): Cool. Thank you. I love it. I’m gonna make something. I want to ask my teachers to make something.

Brent Warner (46:13): Sweet.

Ixchell Reyes (46:18): All right. It is time for our fun finds, and I was supposed to put this on before. But anyway, I have two things to share. I have this hat that I recently got — it was a gift on my trip to the Dominican Republic. And what I’m really excited to share is this little muñeca sin rostro, which means it’s a doll without a face. It’s this little doll — if you’re on YouTube, it’s this little doll. I believe it’s made out of polymer clay, but she doesn’t have a face, and that’s because it symbolizes the mixed heritage of the Dominican people, and she’s dressed in the traditional Dominican clothing. So, muñequitas sin rostro.

Brent Warner (47:06): Very cool, very cool. Cool, love it. Mine is — I’m taking it way back, so I’m going to literature. So those of you who are heavy readers might not really be as enthralled with this, but I went back and recently reread As I Lay Dying. Have you ever read that book? It’s by William Faulkner.

Ixchell Reyes (47:29): I probably did. Okay, a long time ago. So this is —

Brent Warner (47:33): — this is what happens. They assign this book in high school, and it’s totally inappropriate for high school students. It’s not that the content is impossible, but the reading of it is a very, very deep and advanced read, and I think I read it, or something. I can’t even remember, honestly. There’s just no way I was gonna appreciate this at any level when I was a 17-year-old, right? And so, but now going back and reading it as an adult — I mean, you do get a very quick sense of why Faulkner is considered one of the greatest American authors of all time. And guess what? It’s in the public domain now, as of this year, because it was 1930 that it was published, so it’s in the public domain. You can go get it for free. Anyways, I was talking to a friend who’s a heavy reader, and he’s like, “Oh my God!” He didn’t like Faulkner, because there’s lots of stream of consciousness writing and ideas, and you actually have to slow down and commit yourself to reading. It’s not a breezy read in any way. If you haven’t read this for a while, or if you’ve never read it, however, I really loved how I could feel my brain being challenged to slow down, think about what’s going on, try to interpret this language, try to figure out who’s going on with what, you know, all these different things. And it was just fascinating, because it really pulls out a different style of thinking. So if you want to give yourself a little bit of a brain challenge, if you want to read some deservedly classic American literature, it is a fascinating story. It is very dark and heavy, but I do recommend it. It’s a great — so this is your fall fun find.

Brent Warner (49:21): Yeah, it’s not — I mean, it’s not very fun, I guess. But the brain goes in a different way, and so I like that part of it anyway. So cool. Yeah, you know, an oldie and an excellent goodie. So there we go.

Ixchell Reyes (49:35): Excellent. For the show notes and other episodes, check out DIESOL.org/141. You can find us on YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram at DIESOLpod.

Brent Warner (49:50): Hey, and you can find me mostly on LinkedIn at Brent G. Warner, although I do have a couple other accounts in other places.

Ixchell Reyes (49:58): And you can reach me just through the DIESOL pod page, any of them.

Brent Warner (50:04): Yeah, great. That’s the way we’re going to find you now. So wonderful! Thank you all so much, and sorry for the little break here, but we’re good for the fall semester. I think we’re ready to keep rolling. So stay tuned. Give us the likes. Give us the —

Ixchell Reyes (50:18): — reviews, or the comments, or share, like, subscribe, do all the things that people do on YouTube.

Brent Warner (50:24): Yeah, give us — help our algorithm. We’re just an algorithm now. Actually, if you’re on YouTube, yeah, definitely leave us some ideas on how you’re using vibe coding. Yeah, yeah, we’d love to —

Ixchell Reyes (50:34): — see them.

Brent Warner (50:34): So, cool. All right, thanks everybody so much. We’ll see you soon. Bye.