Gain better insights with Busy Things’ A.I. Interviews
Busy Things launched its first A. I. Interview activity earlier this year and the series has quickly grown. Today, your pupils can interview Neil Armstrong, Charles Darwin, Mary Seacole, William Shakespeare, Zeus, a cocoa farmer and an evacuee child from World War II. Each activity allows children to ask any question they want, with generative A.I. responding as that character with the knowledge and perspective he or she would have had.
What are A.I. interview activities?
Our A.I. activities, such as ‘Interview Neil Armstrong’, give pupils something textbooks alone cannot match. They offer direct, curiosity-driven conversations that make complex topics more vivid, more memorable and easier to understand. Instead of wading through pages of text, children can simply follow their interests, ask questions at their own level and receive instant, age-appropriate explanations. This makes learning feel personal, accessible and genuinely exciting.
In this blog, we showcase four of our A.I. Interview activities and hope you take us up on our offer of a free trial, so you can see how engaging the activities are for yourself. Please be assured, no payment details will be taken and there’s no obligation to proceed to subscription.
Interview Neil Armstrong (Science)
Do your pupils want to know about the planets or space missions, past, present or even future? Neil Armstrong is an ideal person to ask!
Ask him anything from how astronauts eat in space to bigger questions about The Big Bang and how the Earth was created.
Benefits:
- Makes tricky space concepts easier to understand
- Ideal for child-led enquiry work and honing interviewing skills
- Brilliant as a whole-class starter or as an extension task
Interview William Shakespeare (English)
Whether pupils are interested in Shakespeare himself, the Tudor period or his plays, he is happy to answer any questions!
You can even use the activity to translate normal sentences into Shakespearean ones!
Benefits:
- Helps pupils grasp the historical context of Shakespeare
- Builds pupils’ confidence with the themes and language of Shakespeare’s plays
- Fun for drama and creative writing
Interview a cocoa farmer (Geography and Fair Trade)
Ever wondered what it’s really like to be a farmer in a developing country and how Fair Trade organisations help. Now you and your pupils can ask one of the farmers directly!
Ama lives in Ghana, growing cocoa in a Fair Trade co-operative, so knows how the scheme works first-hand.
Benefits:
- Supports empathy and cultural understanding
- Helps children understand how Fair Trade works
Interview an evacuee child (History)
Pupils can step into the shoes of a child living through the Second World War.
They can ask about being evacuated, how life is different in the city to the countryside, the war effort and how it feels to leave family behind.
Benefits:
- Encourages empathy through lived-experience style answers
- Deepens understanding of life in those times
- Ideal for enquiry questions and discussion-based lessons
Not sure about using A.I. with pupils?
We understand that A.I. generates a lot of discussion, but we are confident that our characters know exactly who they are and, importantly, that they are responding to children. As with any new technology though, we realise that responses may not always be perfect, so would encourage you to test the activity yourselves for your own peace of mind before allowing your pupils access.
If children are rude when questioning, they will be frozen out of the activity. This is intentional to keep classroom disruption to a minimum.
If you’re not ready for A.I. as yet, don’t worry. All pupil-facing A.I. content on Busy Things can be hidden via Account settings > Basic settings > Privacy settings.
To close…
We hope this blog post has inspired you to explore our A.I. Interview activities, which offer a fresh, exciting, child-led way to learn about history, science, geography and English topics within the curriculum. They work brilliantly as topic starters, independent research tools and discussion prompts, with each answer opening up new lines of enquiry.
To view the interviews, along with our other 1,600+ activities, we need you to take a no-obligation free trial of Busy Things. Using the login we provide, you’ll be able to access all our educational, curriculum-linked games and activities for a full 28 days. If you’d like a guided tour as well, we can organise that for you (and your colleagues too). Just click here to arrange.