In this Career and Technical Education (CTE) with Flint Campfire Session, we focused on how to use Flint and Sparky to support career readiness instruction through realistic role play, localized career exploration, and scaffolded skill-building. The session highlighted how CTE teachers can move beyond generic prompts by grounding activities in real-world scenarios (interviews, competitions, crisis simulations) and then using Groups + Analytics to track student growth and surface actionable insights over time.

Content covered in this session includes:

• Context-setting on AI + CTE trends, referencing an article tied to the Savvas Educator Index survey to frame how educators view AI and CTE as key to future readiness—while calling out gaps in confidence and professional development around responsible, critical AI use.

• A walkthrough of CTE-aligned activity design principles, emphasizing realistic role play, student-specific personalization (resume uploads, career interests), localized context (region-specific jobs/employers/outlook), and clear “end-of-activity” documentation students can take home.

• Live demo: Career exploration activity (upper elementary) using a “career quiz → reflection → deeper exploration” flow, where students input a suggested career path and Sparky guides curiosity-driven follow-up questions, then produces a printable synopsis of the student’s learning and next steps.

• Localization as a differentiator, showing how the same career exploration activity can be adapted for different cities/regions so recommendations feel specific, relevant, and actionable for students.

• Live demo: Model UN crisis simulation, where students choose a country and Sparky generates a scenario with stakeholders, developments, mock data, and a country briefing—useful for preparing students for structured, real-world problem solving and policy-style communication.

• Scaffolded interview preparation (two-part sequence) including:

  • Part 1: Informational interview prep where students upload a resume and specify a job/career target and interview context.

  • Part 2: Mock interview where Sparky speaks as the interviewer and students respond aloud, enabling teachers to review student responses and provide feedback (with optional rubric support).

• Language and fluency customization, demonstrating that activities can be created or converted into Spanish (or other languages) and adjusted by proficiency level to match student needs.

• Public Library as a lesson bank, showing where teachers can search, duplicate, and adapt ready-made CTE activities—reducing time-to-launch and helping teachers avoid “recreating the wheel.”

• Live demo: DECA competition role play, modeled on DECA’s situational performance events and rubric, with a build process that starts in chats (brainstorm + refine) and then converts directly into a student-facing activity via the “Start Activity Builder” feature.

• Live demo: Technical & trade career exploration (high school) that mirrors the career exploration flow but adds more advanced components—local employers, near-future job outlook, and a concrete action plan students can follow (plus a printable output).

• Groups as the backbone of CTE implementation, reinforcing that Groups function as classrooms and enable centralized access to activities, gradebook workflows, and View Analytics for tracking interests, progress, strengths, and growth areas across multiple activities.

• Differentiation strategies for multilingual and newcomer ELL students, including when to use subgroups (privacy + targeted experiences, plus analytics roll-up) versus keeping students in the same activity with built-in accommodations (e.g., language switching), and noting current constraints like per-activity settings that may require separate activities.

• How to preview activities effectively, clarifying the difference between Simulate (fast hypothetical examples to iterate quickly) and Start session manually (true student experience with real-time pacing and required student input).

• Group level background info, recommending copying the main group context into a subgroup and adding only what’s different (e.g., “ELL supports,” language expectations, scaffolds) to keep instruction aligned while improving personalization.

• Community support and sharing, pointing attendees to the Flint Community as a place to ask questions, share example lessons, and learn from other educators’ implementations across subjects like Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, Computer Science, English Language Arts, and World Language—including hands-on, project-based examples that extend beyond Flint.

Slides from the presentation can be found here.

Got more questions, comments, or feedback for this topic? Feel free to raise them within the Flint Community.