“Creativity is a major factor in AI. How you conceptualie and deploy AI technology will make all the difference in your business or professional life.”
Summary
This Drama project harnesses the power of Generative AI chatbots to provide custom made scripts for groups of students to adapt as they see fit. It provides opportunities for students to develop characters and their roles within a performance to suit the skills of their cast and/or explore new ideas.
Overview
Students are to work in groups. They are all given the same script for a musical theatre performance that they are to rehearse and perform. They are to:
Read through the first iteration of a script and collaboratively decide on roles for each student in their group
Decide on ways the script should be adapted to provide:
More/less speaking parts for certain characters
More/less singing parts for certain characters
Variances on the script that alters the storyline
Repeat this process with further iterations of the script provided by the teacher
Rehearse and perform
Reflect on the performance, their choices, the reasons for their choices and the degree of success of their adaptions
Teacher Instructions
Put students into groups
Have ChatGPT create the first iteration for a script for a Musical Theatre performance (see examples below)
Provide one script for each group
Give students time to complete the adaption exercise
Use ChatGPT to create a modified script
Return script to group
Provide opportunities to rehearse, perform and reflect
Achievement Standards
This project is intended for these achievement standards for Year 5&6 Drama from the Australian Curriculum:
They improvise and/or devise drama and/or interpret scripts.
They perform their drama in informal and/or formal settings.
Scroll down to see examples of prompts used and how ChatGPT can be utilised for adapting scripts for this project. (Other chatbots can also be used such as Claude, MS CoPilot)
Matilda's Musical Dreams
Possible adaptions & variations
This project sees the teacher using an AI tool as the students would be under 13 and therefore not permitted to sign up for ChatGPT. The teacher could and indeed should demonstrate the use of a chatbot in this work and the techniques used in prompting to upskill students in responsible use of AI. Likewise, this could also lead to further teaching about how the technology works to provide greater digital and AI literacy to students.
One obvious modification could be to provide the project to high school students over 13 years of age. This could then mean that students are using chatbots rather than the teacher for the same tasks described. The students could be asked to provide evidence of their prompts as part of their project.
Other modified versions of this project could be to adapt the story and not the characters, combine different plays/theatre productions (create a mashup), create a performance that combines something well known with some elements of something that they are familiar with such as a current event or an aspect of their lives. Instructions to a chatbot to adapt the script in this way would enable such adaptions.