The McDonald College wins state AI award for teaching students to think, not copy

The McDonald College has won the primary category of Independent Schools NSW’s 2026 AI Agent Competition with an agent built on an unfashionable premise: that AI should make students work harder, not less.

Designed by Peter Slattery, Director of Junior School and Year 6 classroom teacher, Copy Paste Forget was created in response to a problem most teachers will recognise. Students can now produce a polished, rubric-aligned response in seconds without understanding a word of it. The research cycle of finding, synthesising and presenting collapses into copying, pasting and refining. The mark is earned. The learning is not.

Copy Paste Forget refuses to play that game. It gives no answers. Instead, it interrogates the answer the student has already found.

In a recent Year 6 unit on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, studied alongside Morris Gleitzman’s Boy Overboard, students researched a refugee who had built a successful life in Australia. The agent greeted each student by name, asked who they had chosen, then took them somewhere harder. Why did this person leave? Where is that country? What was happening there at the time? It brought in maps and imagery, pitched the conflict history at a Year 6 level, and steered the conversation towards what refugees contribute to Australian food, culture, sport and business. Students were invited to ask their own questions.

The idea grew from something simpler. Slattery had been experimenting with a conversational coaching tool to revise area calculations with students who wanted extra support and noticed they engaged more readily when the tool asked questions rather than supplied answers.

“Pretending AI isn’t in our students’ lives helps nobody,” Slattery said. “They are already using it. Our job is to teach them how to use it well, and that starts with showing them the difference between getting an answer and understanding one.”

Judged on purpose, design, usefulness and creativity, Copy Paste Forget will be showcased at the 2026 Curriculum Conference in August, where delegates can trial it and build their own versions for their schools.

To find out more about The McDonald College and its approach to teaching in the Junior School, visit mcdonald.nsw.edu.au.