Designing Your Ai Collaborator: A Classroom Activity For Deeper Engagement and Role-Play With Genai

We introduce an activity that moves beyond basic AI prompting by engaging students in the design of custom AI personas. Using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot, students co-create learning partners tailored to their goals, tone preferences, and epistemic stance. Grounded in sociomaterial and postdigital thinking, and metacognitive learning principles, the activity encourages critical reflection on how AI shapes thinking, writing, and judgement. It also supports models of AI literacy that emphasise ethical, adaptive, and dialogic engagement. By embedding humanAI role-play and iterative design into the experience, our activity fosters playful exploration, intellectual challenge, and deeper engagement with AI.