Why Flint
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Case Study
How The Kinkaid School’s long standing interest in AI has led them to partner with Flint
Case Study Summary
Teacher Testimonials
My most successful use of Flint was in my recent unit on stellar evolution, which is historically the unit that my students have had the most trouble with. I had Flint take the role of an astronomer and had the students ask whatever they wanted about black holes. Every student in the class was fully engaged for over twenty minutes. Sometimes, one student would exclaim something like, "What? No way!" when they learned something surprising, often getting other students to dive into those surprising topics. I was able to structure my lessons around topics that the students had found interesting, which really increased their motivation to learn the material. Although using Flint for review for the end-of-unit test was optional, all but two of my students chose to use it. They came into class on the day of the test saying, 'That AI tutor was so helpful! You need to get all the teachers to make tutors like that! Will you set up the tutor again for the final?' The students' performance on the test this year was noticeably higher than in previous years, so what I did with Flint definitely had an impact.
On a more personal side, I was one of the teachers who used Flint to help me write my report card comments. The most important thing that I found: by using Flint to polish my language, I could spend more time thinking about observations about the students rather than on how to express my ideas more effectively. It made what is at best a tedious process into something a little more interesting for me, and I think that my comments were probably more effective feedback for the parents and students as well.
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Flint K12 has transformed my 7th-grade history classroom by serving as a versatile tool for creative projects, personalized student support, and assessment refinement. It has helped my students generate ideas for puppet show scripts, practice quiz preparation, and receive detailed, constructive feedback on their work. The platform has not only enhanced their learning experience but also streamlined my teaching, assisting in developing and evaluating learning materials to ensure best pedagogical practices.
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Flint is my go-to collaborator for crafting essay prompts, designing lesson plans, writing reading quizzes and more! It helps me scaffold student learning with clear, achievable directions. With dynamic writing tutors like the Thesis Whisperer and Evidence Integrator, my students sharpen their skills in distinctive ways. The instant feedback from Flint's chatbot accelerates curiosity and idea generation, driving students to explore concepts more deeply. Consequently, they often discover a deeper understanding of the material, making their learning journey more meaningful and engaging.
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As a history teacher, using FlintK12 in the classroom has transformed our research paper writing process. Not only did it serve as an invaluable editing tool, enhancing students' writing skills, but it also sparked their interest for more targeted learning. Students were inspired to request additional specific tutors within Flint to help their research writing capabilities even further. Truly, FlintK12 has opened doors we didn't even realize were there.
Additionally, as Director of Academics, FlintK12 has been a welcome companion in my job supporting teachers. It offers our teachers an innovative platform to generate creative and relevant lesson plans along with being an invaluable resource in creating engaging review materials. Flint's ability to create activities that enhance our existing curriculum provides our teachers with the perfect tool to make classroom learning more interactive and enriching.
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An introduction to Vinnie Vrotny
Could you introduce yourself and how AI impacts what you do?
I'm the Director of Technology at The Kinkaid School. I sit on our senior administrative leadership team and represent the technology interest, which includes both our technology department and operations. This team both keeps everything functional and working, as well as protects the school through our work on cybersecurity and other system protections.
I also have an important position dedicated to data and institutional research, which is a newer area we're growing at Kinkaid to provide and access to select campus-wide data that helps inform our decision-making.
The third aspect of my role is to coordinate and guide our academic technology team. This includes both our teachers who teach our computer science courses within the school and those who have roles as instructional coaches. We are also supporting new divisional academic leaders with experience in technology integration, which, to me, is the future direction in terms of curriculum and academic support and assessment. If we fully assimilate technology as part of the learning environment and part of the teaching toolkit, there shouldn't be a need for specific technology-based coaches or instructors; it will simply just be part of education. So we're taking some small, but important, foundational steps in that direction.
What I am is a bridge. I'm a connector. I am someone who takes a look at horizons outside of school to begin to identify future opportunities and risks and then bring them on into the appropriate group that needs to begin to address those particular issues.
Kinkaid’s AI Journey
You’re one of the administrators we’ve worked with who has been most on top of all the AI developments coming out from big, established companies, like OpenAI and Khan Academy. What made you decide to partner with Flint, a completely new company?
It's a great question. It goes back to how we've been approaching AI at Kinkaid since the advent of ChatGPT, and actually before that. In 2018, the International Society for Technology and Education (ISTE) offered its first AI Explorations cohort. It was co-sponsored by General Motors. I, as an ISTE leader, had an opportunity to participate in their first cohort. This was six years ago, so eons in terms of where LLMs are now. It's when LLMs were first coming out of the lab and/or into the lab, depending on your perspective.
In 2019, they offered a cohort focused specifically on school-based teams. All of my academic team, a few members of my operations team, and I went through that particular cohort. The capstone for that cohort asked us to develop plans and activities we would begin to introduce to be prepared for, and get other people prepared for AI. And so at that point, we decided to add a fourth pillar to our technology education. We had already established a general foundation:
How to use various technologies to communicate thoughts and ideas, whether it's video, picture, text, audio.
A digital citizenship piece: rights and responsibilities in working and connecting with the outside world.
A computer science, design, engineering and fabrication curriculum—affectionately called our CSDEF.
So we added this fourth pillar, algorithmic literacy. With Kinkaid being a Pre-K, which is four-year-olds, through 12th grade school, we wanted to begin to introduce some activities and opportunities to explore AI at all levels. Through Google Teachable Machine and some additional physical activities, we showed how an LLM works in a glorified game of telephone. I also taught a unit in AI and AI programming in Python with a tool called Zumi, which was a little Raspberry PI. Zumi had vision sensors, so I had a group of high school students work with them in a three-week course during the pandemic. We swapped out robotics, because that was too touch intensive with people being too close to each other, and substituted it with an AI course and programming around AI. Since that first initiative, we have been building a curriculum around AI.
When ChatGPT was released publicly, we were ready. I brought it up as a conversation point in one of our December 2022 senior administrative team meetings and said, “You know, this is a big one, right?” There were a lot of things going on, but this is as big as bringing the Internet into schools, which is what the “big thing” was when I first started this position in my career. Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize education and give us new capabilities.
Our head of school, being very wise, said, “Hey, we're going to lean into this. We're not going to ban it.” At that point in time, when other schools were beginning to just outright ban it, we were going to take a cautious, optimistic look at it.
So as we went through the rest of the 2022-23 school year, we formed an AI research group. We had a science research methods class devote part of their semester to conduct research on the early GPT 3.5. Last year, the number of folks in our AI research group expanded. We began to provide them with professional development and access to a variety of different AI tools. My goal last year was to try to find a solution to provide and bring subscription-level AI to our students to level the playing field so that you didn't have a disparity between those students whose parents would purchase that particular tool for them versus those who either didn't know, couldn't afford, or chose not to purchase those particular tools. That led us to an investigation of a lot of different tools.
We started on “Why Flint?” When we examined a number of different products, it allowed us to do a number of different things. Number one, it provided us an opportunity to provide that subscription-level model at an extremely affordable price because price does factor into our decision-making. We continue to engage in conversations with others. Gemini with Google is not available to those under 13 yet. GPT is expensive, even with their education pricing, which we were early on and had heard about last April, but $300 per person is not sustainable within the budget figures that we had been given within that particular area. That was the main driver—we were able to do it in a cost-effective way.
Additionally, the tools you have built provide additional features for teachers too. It allays their fears about how students are using AI. By providing this platform where, through the creation of class-based groups, teachers have visibility into all of the sessions that a student does with the AI—both from seeing what the student questioned as well as what answer the student got back—gave teachers a level of comfortability and trust. I’ve explained to students why we chose Flint, even if they prefer the clean ChatGPT-type interface, which I’m still pushing the Flint team to improve. What Flint does provide students is the ability to stay within Kinkaid’s honor code so that we can see where a student may have made a leap of learning and had an epiphany moment within their learning versus when they’ve taken the shortcut and just copied and pasted the response back without participating in it.
Secondly, which is equally important, is that visibility also allows us to see the types of questions students are asking. If it's our role to help students learn to leverage AI as part of their education, we need to see what types of questions they're asking so we can coach and teach them how to ask better questions in order to get better results. The other piece, from my perspective, is that it allows me to monitor the results coming back. How good is what comes out of it and what is the value proposition to students so that we can say whether it’s working for us and meeting our needs.
For all of those reasons, we chose Flint. Cost was one. Visibility into the sessions was another because we want people to be able to feel comfortable.
Do you view partnering with Flint as a long-term investment?
I can't answer that. The reason I can't answer is because this field is evolving so quickly. How Flint is going to continue to grow and to adapt might change my thinking on where we are headed with this at Kinkaid. With many platforms, what attracted you to them at the beginning may be lost when the company makes a decision to veer a little bit in a different direction. It may no longer quite match what your needs are and what you're trying to accomplish. If OpenAI would come out and give us similar pricing, it would be a hard one to answer in terms of if we move. We’d have to discuss again what it is that we want to meet our educational goals.
Does Flint feel like a good fit for your teachers then?
Absolutely. Flint gives them the guardrails and visibility into student thinking, which to me I also think is a really positive point because you have more evidence now of the student’s learning process via the types of questions they're asking.
The questions they ask are important in learning as they grow and continue to build skills and go through the productive struggle. The whole thing is, “What is it that I'm learning, where am I going, and how am I thinking?” What's happening in between the ears? When we take a look at various other assessments, sometimes we can get a glimpse of their thinking. Flint allows us to have a window into the process or journey a student is going through, giving teachers a richer and deeper understanding into their learning.
Flint’s role in Kinkaid’s AI policy
How does Flint fit into your school and your AI strategy?
Our goal was to provide a tool for equitable access to all students or for the students that we designate; we chose our 6th- through 12th-grade students as our use case at this particular point in time. That was one of the goals.
Our head of school has set two AI-related goals for this school year, one of which was to determine when’s the best age and time and how to introduce AI to students. Secondly, we needed to explore how to make teachers’ lives more productive and efficient and allow them to be more creative. The focus of our work this upcoming year is to really dive into those two particular questions.
Flint allows us to explore these goals. Flint is a really great student product, but I'm not quite sure yet if it's a good teacher product given the way it's set up. And so, last week Google made an update to Gemini where they now have data protection if you're an Apps for Education workspace customer, which we are. So that will be a second option we will provide to our faculty. More importantly is the partnership between Instructure, the Canvas LMS, and Khanmingo, which was announced in July. We are testing this tool and expect to make it available to teachers in the second semester. So teachers who have courses in Canvas, which are currently our 5th- through 12th-grade teachers, will have free access to the teacher tools from Khanmigo. We're going to explore those tools as well. And, it may be an “and” strategy at this particular point in time. I know a lot of companies like OpenAI and Google are trying to get student-centric tools with the age limits in time for the 2025-26 academic year.
That's on the horizon, but the other side of working with Flint and working with your team is you're extremely responsive and you're available. Oftentimes working with a partner, you get gaslit. That's not the case here.
Flint’s rollout and impact at Kinkaid
What trends you have seen in ways that people at Kinkaid are using Flint, specific departments that have embraced it, etc.?
We're seeing it in a variety of different ways. I really like Flint’s primary developmental focus using learning via tutors (now called activities). To me, it is very similar to the development of custom GPTs, but it's much more accessible and easy to build as compared to a GPT or Anthropic project. We're seeing people begin to dip their toes into the water and explore. The 2022-23 school year was a pre-alpha year, last year was our alpha year, and this is our beta year.
We just closed a faculty and staff survey, which is the third survey that we've done with the same questions. One of the questions we added to this year's survey was, “Are you planning on integrating Flint within your classes?” This was targeted for the Middle School and Upper School. The responses were 25% yes, 25% no, a little less than 50% maybe. They're not sure yet. They've got to see what their colleagues do and are beginning to share amongst themselves.
Some of our science teachers have begun to build tutors around lab report writing. They're generating questions to replace some of the worksheets they had done previously. We're seeing 7th graders who are interviewing historical characters. We're seeing a lot of help with writing across the board, although we do have our skeptics and people who just aren't ready at this particular point in time.
We've got an entrepreneurship course that is developing a tutor to help with ideating a passion project. I just got a request yesterday to spin up a group for our 9th-grade learning specialist who wants to build a tutor around the concepts of planning and time management.
A sixth grade class used the image generation capabilities of Flint to develop visualizations of the character within the novel, Esperanza Rising. This project focused on the student’s developing the skills of close reading character analysis, and writing from a character's point of view. The use of image generation in Flint elevated the experience in some fresh, relevant ways. The students not only enjoyed creating the images of their characters, but they learned a lot about effective prompt writing and using AI as a collaborator.
We've got a lot of ideas, and we're going to be supporting those ideas.
Again, because of the way the interface is targeted, we're not really seeing work being done operationally at this point. We’d like to explore how the non-academic subjects in our Advancement, Admission, and Strategic Communication offices can use AI. For example, within HR, how are we utilizing AI to build efficiencies? I do know that the business office, our controller, as well as our CFO have begun to dabble a little bit more, but we don't have widespread adoption. I want to review those numbers out of the survey. But we haven't spent the time with AI on the operations side, because they don't fit into a regular departmental meeting structure. Therefore, they don't get the same attention. That's an area I want to develop.
Math and science support have been behind a bit when it comes to LLM development. Flint has some additional features in place to support these subjects, so have you seen any interesting math and science usage come about?
Oh, for sure. Absolutely. That’s where some of the interesting growth is. Our physics teachers did a lot of work over the summer and have some really great ideas. We have a marine science teacher who mid-year last year was doing phenomenal work in terms of building rubrics and doing all this classwork with GPT3.5. We asked if she wanted to try Flint and she's just really taken off with it. She was one of our early adopters with students last year. Teachers are looking for ways to integrate this technology.
Also, I want to share our Generative AI Menu with you. What we've done for this upcoming year is we have articulated how AI can be used on various different assignments. And again, this is version 2.2.
Earlier this fall, we conducted a Lunch and Learn with our Upper School teachers and shared the original version of this menu. We have rolled this out to our Middle School faculty as well. During this Lunch and Learn, some of our math and science teachers came up to us and said, “This is really good and really helpful, and this doesn't address all the ways that we might want to use this within math and science.” They started to make suggestions, which we told them we were open to. We decided to let them as departments first begin to try to define what usage looks like and then share it with us. We recently got their articulation, which we will soon thoroughly go through and vet to have conversations. Then, we will add the various different sets of tools to the menu. That’s the kind of collaborative ethos we're building.
I like to use this analogy to sum it all up. You learn when you drive that if you hit ice you're supposed to turn in the direction that you're skidding. It’s kind of the opposite of what you would think. We gave that example—which is really odd here in Houston because we don't deal with ice—but you don't slam on your brakes because then you lose control. You don't turn to try to correct because then you oftentimes overcorrect and cause a greater spin. You turn into the way that you're going to gain control. So, one of the terms we're using here is “we're turning into the skid.”
Usage is a lot stronger this year than the initial roll-out last year, what do you think is bringing teachers back to Flint this year? What besides the initial excitement are they drawn back to?
Usage is a lot stronger. Again, last year was our alpha year of development and we are considering this year our beta year. We had Flint come in during our end-of-year meetings to meet with a number of our faculty who were beginning to explore. Before they headed off to the summer, we wanted them to know we had made the decision to partner with Flint for the upcoming year and give them a chance to think about their experience as well as some of the work that we had done in the fall. So that's one of the reasons you're seeing an increase in usage.
What have you all been doing on your side to get teachers involved?
You know, we're letting it grow organically. We're not requiring it. It's really teachers sharing with other teachers. We do have regular meetings within the divisions to talk about and share what we've learned. We also provide times for purposeful play so that people work within it. One of the great things from our survey this year is that it showed, in the last six months, we started from a third of the people saying they have used generative AI personally or professionally to it now being 90% of our faculty and staff. And we had 205 people reply, which was our highest response rate yet.
We've provided this awareness through very thoughtful times. In fact, this afternoon I’m presenting the high level of the survey results to our administrative leadership team. Since they’re not all in one of the academic departments, they've not seen what we've done. So I'm going to share some of the results from the survey and then give them some time for some purposeful play. We're going to talk a little bit about prompting and what types of things they need to think about within their prompting and then give them a small activity exercise to work on and explore.
Because again, if they're not asked to do that, they're not always thinking about ways to bring AI into their workflows. They will continue to do what they're doing. So we take the use of the time that we can. We've got Lunch and Learns scheduled every three to four weeks in the Upper School when we just allow people to come in and work because it's just about setting aside time.
Course development takes time. Developing a good Flint activity takes time. You can hack one together, and Flint helps automate some of the process, but to really get it to do what you want it to do takes some rule tweaking. That’s why we’re focused on providing the time and space for people to get together, figure out what is working and what isn’t, suggest rules to add to the AI’s behavior, and discuss ideas and learning. It's that organic sharing.
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