The AI Spark involves deconstructing complex physics problems in individual steps and understanding how these steps relate to concepts learned in class. This is achieved through a Socratic tutoring process: the tool never provides answers but rather asks questions leading the student to think about how to solve the problem.
Because this online MBA course covers a wide range of topics, the AI Spark learning activity will be used to dig deeper into specific areas that are not covered as deeply in class.
The purpose of this Spark is to support students' preparation for a class debate on "to plan or not to plan," whether planning matters or generates public good. In past years, students have struggled to provide both arguments and evidence, as well as to prepare effective rebuttals to the opposing team's arguments; the debate coach prompts them to do these things by providing pushback and guidance (without offering answers).
The purpose of this activity is to transform intimidating, abstract psychometric statistics into an approachable, interactive learning experience for first-semester graduate students. By using a guided Socratic approach, the activity bridges the gap between memorizing textbook definitions and confidently interpreting assessment scores in real-world clinical practice.
Graduate counseling students rarely get to rehearse suicide risk and behavioral threat assessment before doing it with real youth, because live cases cannot be summoned on demand and practicum exposure is uneven. This AI Spark gives every student unlimited, developmentally realistic practice interviewing a simulated adolescent client and determining risk or threat level, with immediate structured feedback against established clinical frameworks.
This AI Spark is designed to support students in moving from foundational knowledge of developmental theory to deeper application and analysis. It addresses the instructional gap that can occur when students are able to define or recognize course concepts but have difficulty using those concepts to interpret complex developmental experiences, weigh multiple pieces of evidence, and explain the reasoning behind their conclusions.
Students often memorize Large Language Model (LLM) terminology without developing a connected understanding of how tokens, embeddings, positional information, attention, and transformer components work together. This AI Spark uses a custom Gemini Gem as an adaptive Socratic tutor that diagnoses prior understanding, provides progressive hints, corrects misconceptions, and connects foundational concepts to GenAI systems engineering.
The purpose of this Spark activity is to provide guidance to graduate music students in creating a listening journal entry. While music students listen (and are required to listen) to recordings or view performances, they often do not keep track of what they've heard and are left scrambling to remember a terrific performance or a particularly memorable passage. . One of the class assignments has been to provide a listening journal entry with specific prompts. This Spark creates in-depth prompts for response and assists students in creating a cohesive journal entry.
This Spark activity guides students through close text analysis using a tailored Gemini Gem, then instructs them on how to design and build their own custom Gemini Gem. It addresses the challenge of helping students move past surface-level readings into deep, analytical reflection on literary storytelling techniques while developing practical AI creation skills.
This Gemini Gem is designed to remind students, at the start of the semester, that while using AI to complete assignments may feel helpful in the moment, it can ultimately undermine the critical and computational thinking skills employers value most. Using the concept of an "AI Idiot," the Gem stresses that any use of generative AI should be thoughtful and engaged, not a matter of accepting AI output without critical examination.
