Teaching / classroom reference

A working classroom layer for the ij8 studio.

For educators evaluating ij8 as a place to teach: its stance on AI in the classroom, how a course is authored, how students learn by making, how an AI tutor coaches and a grader assesses the process — and the learning research it rests on.

01 For teachers, professors, workshop leaders, and institutions.

02 The classroom sits on the same chat and canvas a working artist uses.

03 Every capability is tied to a teaching purpose, grounded in learning research.

00

Premise

ij8 is a creative studio with a classroom built into the same making surface. It teaches AI literacy, computational thinking, design, and creative innovation by having students make real work — self-paced, with the instructor authoring the constraints and watching every step. Its stance on AI is a middle way: neither banning it nor handing it the work, but teaching students to direct and judge it. This page describes the teaching layer; the catalogue of creative tools lives at tooling.ij8.ai.

ij8 showcase reader landing
The student-work showcase at showcase.ij8.ai — the public home for class galleries.
ij8 sign-in surface
The ij8.ai sign-in surface, where students and teachers enter the studio.
Generative artwork made in the ij8 studio
The kind of work students make in the studio canvas.
01

A middle way

The hardest question in education right now is what to do about AI. ij8's answer is a deliberate middle path: students use AI in the open, are coached while they work, and are assessed on their thinking — so they build skill with AI rather than dependence on it.

Two responses dominate, and both fail students. Banning AI pretends away the tools that now sit under most professional practice and leaves graduates unprepared for the work they will actually do. Handing the work to AI produces output without understanding and erodes the judgment school exists to build. ij8 takes the path between them: AI is a collaborator the student directs, critiques, and learns from. The partnership cuts both ways: the student is never replaced by the AI, and never asked to work like a machine. The student brings the vision, the taste, and the questions; the AI brings the speed and the hands — and the work that results is more human, more expressive, and more the student's own, not less. That one choice is why the grader weighs process and understanding over polish, why the tutor coaches instead of completing, why instructors set the constraints and see every attempt, and why the finished artifact is always the student's own.

AI literacy

Directing AI systems with intent and judging their output critically — knowing when a result is strong, when it is generic, and when to push back — instead of accepting whatever a prompt returns.

Computational thinking

Decomposition, abstraction, and systematic problem-solving, practiced through real code in p5.js, three.js, and GLSL and through generative pipelines — not described in the abstract.

Design

Intentional choices about audience, form, and constraint, and the discipline of iterating toward them rather than settling for the first result.

Creative innovation

Making something specific and new — the opposite of generic AI output — and being able to say why it is theirs.

The model is self-paced but never unsupervised. Students move at their own pace: the mastery bar is a visible goal the rubric reports toward, not a lock, and students advance when they are ready. The instructor authors every constraint, sees every attempt and score, and curates what is shared: autonomy for the student, visibility and control for the teacher.

This stance is not a slogan on a slide; it is written into the AI itself. The tutor's standing instructions name the learner as the creator and director and the AI as their implementer and thinking partner, tell it to pull students in to inspect and redirect what was made rather than spectate, and to treat its own imperfection as a normal, workable fact — never pretending output is flawless, never treating a wobble as a crisis. Directing, judging, and revising the AI's work is the skill being taught, and the voice of the platform is built to practice it.

02

Teaching model

The pedagogy is not a layer of slogans; it is built into how a lesson behaves. Each principle below maps a long-standing idea in learning research onto something the student and teacher actually do.

Learn by making

Every lesson is a making session. Students produce an image, animation, 3D form, sketch, app, sound, or piece of writing — not a multiple-choice answer. This is constructionism: Papert's argument that durable understanding comes from building something shareable, brought into a contemporary studio.

Process over product

The score weighs how the work was made — iteration, refinement, intentional choices, and the student's own explanation — alongside the finished piece. This is assessment for learning in Black and Wiliam's sense: feedback on the process, not a single terminal mark.

Constraint as curriculum

A lesson sets what students may make, an optional starting point, a time limit, learning goals, and a mastery bar. The constraint is the assignment. A well-chosen boundary is an engine of creative work, not a limit on it — the design-studio brief, formalized.

Coaching in the zone

An AI tutor works alongside the student, with hints the instructor writes as soft nudges or hard requirements. This is scaffolding inside Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, and it puts within reach the one-to-one coaching Bloom found moves outcomes far beyond whole-class instruction.

Instructor in control

Authoring, class rosters, publishing, grading visibility, and showcase curation are explicit teacher decisions, not hidden automation. The tutor coaches; the teacher decides the goals, the mastery bar, and what counts.

Structure made visible

App Lab turns a vague idea into named stages and shows the conceptual parts of a program before any code is written. Making hidden structure visible lowers needless cognitive load and supports reflective practice — the same reason Processing's tabs and Photoshop's layers help novices see separation of concerns.

Grounding: Papert, Mindstorms (1980); Vygotsky, Mind in Society (1978); Wood, Bruner & Ross on scaffolding (1976); Bloom, the two-sigma problem (1984) and mastery learning (1968); Black & Wiliam, Inside the Black Box (1998); Collins, Brown & Newman on cognitive apprenticeship (1989); Sweller on cognitive load (1988); Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (1983); Stokes, Creativity from Constraint (2006); Lave & Wenger, Situated Learning (1991).

03

Course authoring

A teacher can stand up a course in one sitting: bring a syllabus or a one-line description, let the system draft a lesson sequence, then review and shape every lesson before students ever see it.

04

Lessons

A lesson is both the assignment and its rules. It decides what a student may make, how the tutor opens, what counts as mastery, and how students pace their own progress through the work.

What students may make

Each lesson allows one or more media: image, video, 3D, code, app, audio, or writing. An empty setting leaves the lesson open; a chosen set restricts the tools so the assignment stays focused. When writing is allowed alongside another medium, the studio opens in the making mode so the canvas is not crowded out.

A defined starting point

A lesson can carry starting code, an opening tutor prompt, and private instructor notes that shape the tutor's behavior without being shown to students.

Goals and a mastery bar

Learning goals and a mastery threshold — 80 out of 100 by default — define what success looks like and give the student a clear target to work toward.

Time and budget

A lesson can set an optional time limit; left unset, time is unlimited. Each lesson also carries an AI-usage budget, tracked and displayed in the session so both student and teacher can see resource use at a glance.

Instructor hints

Teachers attach guidance the tutor follows, each marked as a soft nudge or a hard requirement — the instructor decides when a hint is a suggestion and when it is a rule.

Attempts, pause, resume

A student can pause and resume a lesson, return to the most recent attempt, or restart cleanly. Earlier attempts are kept, not overwritten, so progress and history both survive.

Progression

Lessons are self-paced. The mastery bar — 80 by default — is a goal the live score reports toward, and the next lesson is always open: a student moves on when they are ready, never when a gate decides. A time limit, when set, can end an attempt and record its score; it never locks the path forward. Every attempt and score remains visible to the instructor.

A shareable result

Submitting a lesson produces a stable public link to the finished work and its score — a read-only page that never exposes the chat transcript or the student's account.

05

Tutorials

Lessons are open-ended studio assignments. Tutorials are their counterpart: a well-prepared AI tutor walking one tightly scoped concept — coordinate systems, recursion, particle systems, how diffusion models work — along a planned arc, using the canvas itself as the blackboard. Every idea is illustrated with a live, runnable sketch, not a static diagram. There are fifty official tutorials today, and teachers can author their own.

Explain → Show → Play → Make

Four phases with distinct jobs: the concept taught properly against a canvas illustration; the concept running live in readable code; the student driving it through guided experiments and predictions; and the student building something of their own from suggested directions — or their own. The arc is deterministic — the tutor cannot wander off-script — and the student paces it: the next phase begins when they say they are ready.

The canvas is the blackboard

Every phase puts a live sketch on the canvas. Illustrations are prepared and vetted before any student sees them: some are hand-authored interactive widgets, the rest are AI-generated sketches that must pass an automated visual review for beginner clarity — plain, literal, diagram-like — and are refined until they do. A vetted illustration is frozen, so every student sees the same thing; a background curator can only ever replace one with something better.

Play and learn, not graded coursework

Tutorials are deliberately ungraded. They ask for light understanding reflections, not rubric scores — the formative counterpart to lessons' assessed work. Any signed-in account can take any official tutorial, with or without a course.

Fifty official tutorials

The catalogue spans four bands: foundations of code; objects, data structures, and algorithms; advanced creative coding; and AI itself — from a perceptron and a tiny neural network to embeddings, semantic search, diffusion, latent space, prompt-as-parameter, and iterating with AI as an explicit, practiced skill. Search works across title, concept, tag, and difficulty.

Teachers author their own

A teacher brings a concept; a wizard drafts the four-phase arc; an AI co-author proposes refinements the teacher applies or rejects — propose, do not impose; the teacher is the author. Illustrations are generated, visually scored, and frozen only when the teacher accepts them, so what students see is exactly what the teacher approved. Published tutorials can be shared to the Commons for other teachers to clone, and attached to any of the teacher's courses.

Same voice, same stance

The tutorial tutor carries the platform's collaboration ethos: the learner directs, the AI implements, and imperfect output is an invitation to inspect, redirect, and iterate — the back-and-forth is the skill.

Curation of the official set — seeding, batch illustration review, promotion — is a platform-staff operation, not a teacher burden.

06

How work is scored

Scoring is a transparent rubric, not a black box. It rewards the making and the thinking, not only the final artifact — formative assessment, with a clear bar for mastery.

The grader sees the actual artifact — the finished image, animation, or 3D form, not only its description — alongside the student's prompts, code, and explanations. It is calibrated for high-school and undergraduate workshop work: solid, intentional effort lands in the 70–80 band, not a failing score. Code and non-code lessons are judged on comparable but appropriate evidence, so a writing or image lesson is never penalized for lacking code edits. Scores update live for the student as they work, and if the grader cannot reach a judgment it withholds points rather than inventing them. The mastery bar the rubric reports is a goal, not a gate: progression is the student's, while the score keeps both student and teacher honest about where the work stands — mastery learning's clear bar, kept formative and made visible in real time.

07

Classes, roles, and access

Access is layered and safe by default. Students get a sensible baseline; teachers grant more per class; nothing a student already has is silently taken away.

Roles

Accounts are teachers, students, administrators, general users — plus an internal platform-staff role. Role decides what someone may author, see, and manage; teaching tools are reserved for teachers and admins.

A class is a cohort

A class roster is a cohort tied one-to-one to a course. Members join as teacher or student. Publishing a course enrolls its roster automatically.

Rosters ready on day one

A student's email can be pre-assigned to one or more classes before they ever sign in; on first sign-in they land in the right classes, already enrolled — no manual add on the first day.

Student baseline

By default students can generate and edit code, use reference images, prompt enhancement, and code explanation. Image, video, 3D, audio, and App Lab generation stay off until a teacher turns them on for a class.

Per-class grants

A teacher opts a class into additional capabilities for the work that class is doing. Grants only add capability; they never revoke what a student's role already allows.

Compute per class

A class can be granted access to the university supercomputer for educational work, or to a commercial cloud backend for paid courses, and can be pinned to a single backend so every student runs the same way.

08

Where student work runs

A classroom needs compute that scales to a full class and matches the course's funding model. The teaching layer decides where work runs; the studio handles the generation itself.

09

The Commons

The Commons is a shared pool of courses and tutorials teachers can browse and adopt — a way to start from a colleague's course rather than from scratch.

10

Reporting and assessment

Teachers get a live picture of the class and a record they can take elsewhere: a progress summary, a spreadsheet export, an AI-written narrative, and per-attempt comments.

Class summary

A report rolls up who is active, who has completed, total attempts, average mastery, and a per-student breakdown — a single view of where the class stands.

Spreadsheet export

The same data exports as a spreadsheet — student, enrollment status, lesson, attempt status, started and completed timestamps, and the full rubric per attempt: total score plus the mastery, engagement, originality, process, and understanding dimensions — for a teacher's own gradebook.

Narrative summary

An optional AI-written prose summary describes how the class is progressing, for a teacher who wants a readable account rather than a table.

Per-attempt comments

Teachers leave feedback on an individual lesson attempt, tied to that student's work.

Message the class

A teacher can email every student in a class from the roster view — subject and message, sent to enrolled students and roster members alike, with replies going straight to the teacher's own address.

External handoff

Finished work is shared through a public link. There is no LMS or grade-passback integration today — the link is the current bridge to an outside gradebook.

11

App Lab

App Lab teaches application design by making the hidden structure of a program visible before any code is written. It forces specification before building — the discipline novice builders most often skip.

App Lab running in the ij8 studio canvas
App Lab inside the studio: the brief and conceptual structure on one side, a working prototype on the other.
12

Storyboards and projects

Beyond single-artifact lessons, a storyboard is a student's project workspace — a place to take an idea from a loose brainstorm to a larger, multi-part piece, and to present it. It is where bigger work is developed and rehearsed before it is shared.

This is the develop-and-share arc: a student builds and presents a project as a storyboard, then publishes selected work to the class gallery. The platform carries a project from first idea to public exhibition without leaving the canvas.

13

Student showcase

The showcase is a public gallery of student work that the teacher curates — a class exhibition, separate from the studio's commercial gallery. Public critique and exhibition are how studios have always taught. Finished lessons and storyboard projects are what students publish here.

Students submit

From the canvas, a student submits selected pieces to a class gallery for the courses they are enrolled in. Students can also withdraw a submission at any time — removal takes it out of the gallery without touching the original work. A Class gallery button inside the lesson view opens the cohort's gallery directly.

Teachers curate

The teacher approves or declines each submission and chooses whether it stays visible to the class only or goes fully public — the curation is the crit. A gallery can also be set to auto-approve, publishing new submissions immediately — review-first or trust-first is the teacher's call per gallery.

A public reader

Approved, public work appears on a dedicated reader at showcase.ij8.ai, grouped into scenes the teacher arranges. Each class gallery lives at its own instructor-shared address.

Live, not flat

Code sketches appear in the grid as still poster frames captured from the running sketch, and play live on click — so a gallery of forty sketches loads like a gallery, and each piece still behaves as it really does. Renders are seeded deterministically, so a piece looks the same on every visit and every device.

Separate from commerce

The showcase is classroom-shaped — cohort identity, teacher curation, no wallet or sale. It is a different surface from the ij8 NFT gallery.

Credit by choice

Public pieces show an opt-in author credit only; a student's account name is never published.

The student showcase reader
The showcase reader. Individual class galleries open at instructor-shared addresses.
The ij8 NFT gallery
gallery.ij8.ai, the ij8 NFT gallery — a separate product from the class showcase.
14

How a class runs

Ordinary classroom work, mapped onto the studio: author, enroll, make, coach, score, advance, submit, curate, report.

  1. Author the course

    The teacher brings a syllabus or a description and drafts a lesson sequence in the course wizard or the author workspace.

  2. Shape the lessons

    Each lesson's media, goals, framework, difficulty, time limit, and mastery bar are reviewed and set before publishing; concept tutorials are interleaved between lessons where they help.

  3. Publish and invite

    Publishing generates a join code; students on the roster are enrolled automatically.

  4. Students arrive

    Pre-assigned students land in the right classes on first sign-in, already enrolled.

  5. Start a lesson

    A student opens a lesson and resumes their latest attempt or starts fresh, greeted by the tutor's opening prompt.

  6. Make in the canvas

    The student works using only the lesson's allowed media, coached by the tutor within the instructor's guidance.

  7. Score and advance

    The rubric updates live as the student works. The mastery bar is the goal in view; the student opens the next lesson when they are ready, and the instructor sees every attempt and score.

  8. Submit the work

    The student submits, producing a shareable public link to the finished piece and its score.

  9. Curate the showcase

    Students submit pieces to the class gallery; the teacher approves and sets class-only or public visibility.

  10. Review the class

    The teacher reads the progress report, exports a spreadsheet, and leaves comments on individual attempts.

15

Roadmap

Each item is marked by its current state: shipping, rolling out, in progress, or not yet built.

StateItemNotes
ShippingGuided tutorialsFifty official Explain → Show → Play → Make tutorials with vetted live-canvas illustrations; ungraded, self-serve, searchable.
ShippingInstructor-authored tutorialsScaffold wizard, AI co-authoring with apply-to-accept proposals, illustration review with accept-to-freeze, Commons sharing, course attachment.
ShippingCourse authoringCourse wizard, AI-drafted lessons, syllabus import, lesson editing, clone, archive, and publishing.
ShippingLessons + attemptsLesson setup, start and resume, restart, pause and resume, timed sessions, progression, and a shareable submission.
ShippingScoringA five-dimension rubric, fair treatment of code and non-code work, artifact-aware judging, and a live score view.
ShippingClasses + accessRoles, class rosters, per-class capability grants, compute access, and roster pre-assignment.
ShippingCommonsBrowse and adopt courses and tutorials other teachers have published.
ShippingReports + exportA class progress summary, spreadsheet export, an AI-written narrative, and per-attempt comments.
ShippingApp LabShape, Map, Prototype, Inspect, Iterate, and Handoff stages for teaching application design.
ShippingStudent showcaseSubmission, teacher curation (review-first or auto-approve), still-frame posters with live playback, opt-in author credit, student-controlled withdrawal, and a public reader.
In progressCancelling long jobs3D generation jobs are cancelable mid-pipeline with per-stage timeouts; the same treatment for video and other long jobs is in progress.
Not yet builtLMS / grade passbackNo direct LMS or grade-passback link. Work is shared through a public link rather than a gradebook sync.
PlannedWriting as a mediumText lessons support structured brainstorming today; narrative, fiction, and poetry modes are visible in the product but not yet enabled. A dedicated computational-writing toolset is planned.
16

What educators shape

The classroom layer works today, but the open questions are pedagogical as much as technical, and a founding cohort of instructors is invited to settle them.

The decisions that matter are specific: how much scaffolding to build into a lesson before the canvas stops feeling open; where peer visibility belongs, and whether it should be class-only, public, or link-gated; whether an LMS and grade passback are worth the institutional cost; how far instructor-authored tutorials should go — shared arcs, departmental libraries, or a public exchange; how class analytics should grow beyond today's progress rollup; and how App Lab should reveal structure without turning every assignment into a software-engineering exercise. These are questions about teaching, and they are better answered with working educators than for them. Institutions ready to put that to work — a higher-education studio pilot, a CTE pathway, or a grant-backed implementation — can start at pilots.ij8.ai.

17

Technical appendix

For technical reviewers: the tables, routes, components, and models behind the classroom layer. Educators can skip this; it is a reference index, not part of the narrative.

LayerTechnology / pathStatus / use
ModelsGEMINI_CHAT_MODEL default gemini-3.5-flash; SCAFFOLD_MODEL; GEMINI_JUDGE_MODEL default gemini-3.1-flash-lite; GEMINI_CODE_MODEL default gemini-3.5-flash; OPENAI_CODE_MODEL default gpt-5.4Lesson tutor, course scaffolding, judge and reports, App Lab prototype generation.
Tablescourses, lessons, lesson_sessions, cohorts, cohort_memberships, course_deployments, course_enrollments, course_comments, allowed_emails, allowed_email_cohorts, invites, collections, collection_items, tutorials, tutorial_illustrations, tutorial_sessions, course_tutorialsCore classroom and showcase data model. 36 tables total.
Course routes/api/courses, /api/courses/[id], /api/courses/[id]/clone, /api/courses/[id]/archive, /api/courses/[id]/publish, /api/courses/[id]/curriculum (merged ordered lessons+tutorials), /api/courses/[id]/tutorials, /api/courses/[id]/messages, /api/courses/scaffold, /api/courses/scaffold/finalize, /api/courses/syllabus/parse, /api/courses/syllabus/brainstorm, /api/courses/syllabus/summarizeAuthoring, publishing, syllabus ingestion, messaging, course composition, and AI scaffold.
Lesson routes/api/lessons/[slug]/start, /api/lessons/sessions/[id]/score, /api/lessons/sessions/[id]/next, /api/lessons/sessions/[id]/restart, /api/lessons/sessions/[id]/pause, /api/lessons/sessions/[id]/resume, /api/lessons/sessions/[id]/submit, /api/lessons/sessions/[id]/comments, /api/lessons/sessions/[id]/concept-responses, /api/lessons/by-chat/[chatSessionId], /share/lesson/[token]Student runtime, progression, score, timer, comments, concept responses, and submission handoff.
Commons/api/commons/courses, /api/commons/courses/[id], /api/commons/tutorials, CommonsBrowserShared course and tutorial pool.
Tutorials/api/tutorials, /api/tutorials/library, /api/tutorials/scaffold (+finalize), /api/tutorials/[slug] (+/start, /author-session, /illustrate, /clone), /api/commons/tutorials, seed-tutorials.ts (50 official), illustration-agent.ts + verify-refine.ts + illustration-heartbeat.ts, archetypes (mapping-diagram, step-builder, param-explorer, live-animated), TutorialsDashboard, TutorialWizardModal, TutorialAuthorWorkspace, TutorialPhaseBarTutorial runtime, instructor authoring, Commons sharing, course composition.
Reports/api/courses/[id]/report, /api/courses/[id]/report.csv, summarizeReport, generateCourseNarrative, rowsToCsvAssessment summary and export.
App Labcontext-pack.ts, shape.ts, map.ts, prototype-generator.ts, inspect.ts, virtual-files.ts, detect-underspecification.ts, stage-selection.tsTeaching application design through staged context and prototype generation.
Showcaseapps/showcase, /api/showcase/available, /api/showcase/[id]/submit, /api/showcase/[id]/submissions, /api/showcase/[id]/items/[imageId], /api/showcase/public/[slug], /api/sketches/[id]/wrapped, /api/sketches/[id]/poster, showcaseAutoApprove, ShowcaseCurationClass-gallery submission, curation, trust mode, poster frames, and public reader.
ComponentsCourseWizardModal, CourseAuthorWorkspace, CoursesDashboard, TeacherPanel, ShowcaseCuration, LessonScoreHud, LearnPanel, GistPane, HowItWorksPane, BrainstormScratchpad, StudentsMatrixTeacher and student-facing classroom surfaces.
Static siteSelf-hosted InterVariable.woff2, local images, local script.js, no tracking, no external scripts.Single-page static output for classroom.ij8.ai. Last rendered .