Year 9 Digital Fluency students are currently completing a “vibe coding” unit, where they are learning how to use artificial intelligence to help design and build their own digital products.
Rather than simply asking AI to make something for them, students are learning how to work with AI as part of a real software-development process. They need to come up with ideas, describe what they want to build, test what the AI produces, identify problems, make changes, and gradually improve their project.
Over the past fortnight, the class has reached an important milestone: every student has now been set up with a real developer technology stack using Visual Studio Code and GitHub.
Visual Studio Code is the software development environment used to write and edit the code for their projects. GitHub is an industry-standard platform used by software developers to store code, track changes, manage different versions of a project and collaborate with others.
Students have been learning how to:
- open and edit their projects in Visual Studio Code
- connect their work to GitHub
- save changes using commits
- keep a record of how their project develops over time
- troubleshoot technical problems when something does not work
- use AI coding tools to help them create and improve their projects
This means students are now working in a much more authentic development environment, using many of the same tools and processes that professional software developers use.
Coming Up
Students will now use this developer setup to continue building their own interactive digital projects, particularly small games and applications.
As their projects develop, the focus will move beyond simply getting something working. Students will need to test their ideas, collect feedback from classmates, identify weaknesses, and make deliberate improvements.
They will also begin keeping clearer evidence of the development process, including what feedback they received, what changes they made, and why they made those changes.
The goal is for students to experience something much closer to a real product-development cycle: starting with an idea, producing an early prototype, testing it with users, improving it, and eventually presenting a more polished final product.
Why This Unit
The main purpose of the unit is to develop students’ digital problem-solving skills in an AI-rich environment.
Vibe coding allows students to build much more ambitious digital products than they could by learning programming syntax alone, but the emphasis is not on letting AI do all the thinking. Students are instead learning how to give clear instructions, evaluate AI-generated code, spot mistakes, troubleshoot problems, respond to feedback and make informed decisions about how their product should develop.
Using Visual Studio Code and GitHub also exposes students to professional software-development practices at an early stage and helps them understand that creating good digital products is an iterative process of designing, testing and improving.
