Sixth-form teaching is closer to a seminar, with small groups, long texts and arguments between interpretations. The technology in these lessons mostly serves that conversation.
Year 12 defend Schlesinger, Williams or Gaddis on the origins of the Cold War. Year 13 comment on three critics' readings of The Great Gatsby in a shared Doc. Year 13 give a line-by-line code review of a practice library-loans program.
Older students are also ready to put sources and tools under test. Year 12 check Gemini's summary of Aquinas' first three Ways against the Summa. Year 13 test the secularisation thesis against Census data. Year 13 critique an AI translation of the opening of L'Étranger.
And independent making gets ambitious: a Markov-chain melody generator trained on Bach chorales, a textile print generated from Met Office rainfall records since 1836, a four-episode French podcast series made for Year 9 learners.
Art
During the summer show, each student duplicates their Procreate painting every day and paints two rival next stages from the same point, visitors vote between them in Mentimeter, and the winner becomes the base for the next day.
Each student curates one room of a shared CoSpaces Edu gallery around a theme, hanging their own work beside two classmates' pieces with a written curatorial rationale.
For the end-of-year show, each student makes a short video label that plays beside their physical work, showing its making, the compositions they rejected and their own spoken statement.
Students take the Met Office monthly rainfall series for their region since 1836, write p5.js rules that turn every month into a mark, and print the generated design onto fabric.
Students code a p5.js piece that reads how much a spectator moves and how loudly they speak, so every visitor changes the work, with no images or sound stored.
Computing
Students comment on the attributes of a trip-booking table that break 2NF or 3NF, and the plenary starts from the attributes the class disagrees on.
Two named peers comment on each student's practice library-loans code in a shared Doc, and writers fix the flagged lines in Replit and rerun the teacher's tests.
Students vote on the best search method for one lookup and for ten thousand lookups in an unsorted list, and the teacher uses the split to expose the cost of sorting.
The teacher runs Copilot on the board, asking the same questions in fresh chats and following its cited links, while students record what changes and what holds, then connect it to how language models predict text.
Drama
Students taking the sound design role write a Sonic Pi program that generates the underscore for their group's devised piece as it runs, and change it live in response to the actors in each run.
Design and technology
The teacher films drop-weight impact tests on strips the class cut and notched, in slow motion, and replays them so students can see how each polymer fails.
English
Over three lessons, groups build a corpus of 20 Gemini-written film review openings, code it against 20 published openings, and write up what the data shows about machine-written reviews.
Each student posts a short reading of the opening of Mrs Dalloway through an assigned critical lens, and the teacher pairs clashing readings live.
Geography
Students post three hypotheses for the class's practice fieldwork site to a Padlet, three named peers comment on each, and students revise their preferred one.
Students comment on the most and least convincing lines of an extract about Bangladesh's garment industry, reply to classmates who disagree, and the plenary runs from the longest threads.
History
Students post a 150-word defence of the orthodox, revisionist or post-revisionist view in that historian's Padlet column, then counter a post in another column.
Students rate the reliability of John Reed's eyewitness account on a Mentimeter scale, the teacher re-teaches provenance from the spread, and students rate again.
Pairs question Gemini about three historians of the English Reformation, try it with repeated and leading questions, and check every claim and quotation against extracts in a shared reliability log.
Maths
Students decide whether pairs of 3D lines intersect, are parallel or are skew, check in GeoGebra 3D, and the teacher uses the live Classroom view to pick errors to discuss.
Students vote for the best conclusion to a binomial hypothesis test, defend their choice in pairs on a Padlet, and re-vote after the teacher tackles the misconceptions.
Students differentiate the same function by the route of their choice, check it in GeoGebra, and post their working so the teacher can compare routes.
Languages (MFL)
Students build a 3D exhibit on a festival from the Spanish-speaking world in CoSpaces Edu, with recorded Spanish commentary, and Grade 8 visitors view each one in AR at a marked spot in the grounds.
Pairs script and record four short French podcast episodes on A-level themes, pitched for Grade 8 learners, with two-voice dialogue, a music bed and a glossary for each.
Grade 11 and a partner Gymnasium class in Leipzig answer the same anonymous survey on digital life, and the UK students write a German analysis of the differences that the Leipzig class then challenges and corrects.
Students translate the opening of Camus's L'Étranger themselves, generate a set of Gemini translations under briefs they design, and write a commentary on which choices the machine makes every time and which shift.
Students work with the census population of all 183 municipalities in the province of Soria since 1900, sort and chart the losses, and write a data-led article in Spanish around what they find.
Music
Students compose a short piece in Sonic Pi from live loops, chance events and a melody built from a variable, then perform it by changing the code while it plays.
Students code a p5.js sound installation for the school foyer that listens to the room's noise level and the time of day, and changes its texture, harmony and density in response.
Students count note-to-note moves in Bach chorale melodies to build a simple statistical model, code it in Sonic Pi to generate new melodies, and critique what it captures and misses.
PSHE
Pairs script and record a five-minute podcast episode that explains Plan 5 student loans to Grade 10, answering common myths with worked examples.
RE
Over four lessons, a Grade 12 class interviews four faith practitioners in staff-hosted video calls, analyses anonymised transcripts against A-level content and builds a shared study on a school-only Google Site.
A Grade 11 class and a partner sixth form studying the same ethics paper annotate one euthanasia scenario through natural law and situation ethics, then test each other's strongest annotations in a live call.
Two sixth forms hold an Oxford-style debate on assisted dying with mixed-school teams, and a Mentimeter vote before and after shows which side changed the most minds.
Students ask Gemini to summarise the first three of Aquinas' Five Ways and test each sentence against the text of Summa Theologiae I, question 2, article 3.
Pairs set Stellarium to London, Edinburgh and Makkah on different dates, find where the sun sits at the times that define Fajr and Isha, and explain why British mosques use different timetables in midsummer.
Pairs set Stellarium to sunset in Mecca, London and Jakarta on the evenings after the new moon of 17 February 2026, record the crescent's position, and use the results to weigh local sighting, following the Saudi announcement, and calculation.
Pairs interrogate the 2011 and 2021 Census religion figures for every local authority in England and Wales in Google Sheets, to test whether Christian decline is as even as the secularisation thesis suggests.
Science
Each student adds one method change for the free-fall practical to a shared sheet with its estimated effect on uncertainty, and the teacher sorts and challenges the estimates live.
Students post inferences about what a six-mark biology mark scheme rewards, and the teacher groups them live into revision rules.
Students rank four answers to an A-level chemistry 'suggest' question by expected marks, then compare the class ranking with the marks each answer earns against the mark scheme.
Lessons that look like one cell but sit in another
Useful counter-examples when you are checking your own lesson placement on the PICRAT grid.
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and grade. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.