Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Can Teachers Outsmart AI? Mike Yates on AI Poetry Slams and Hackathons at the Reinvention Lab
Mike Yates is a Senior Designer at Teach for America's Reinvention Lab, with over a decade of experience at the intersection of technology and learning. A former classroom teacher and founding member of Alpha School, he now leads the Lab’s AI initiatives, creating workshops, coaching educators, and prototyping innovative AI solutions. Mike has built partnerships with organizations like Playlab AI, Google, and Snapchat, and remains dedicated to helping educators navigate the future of learning through practical, human-centered approaches.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why teachers don’t need to “speak Silicon Valley” to embrace AI.
- How AI hackathons and poetry slams are making AI learning more human and fun.
- The concept of “AI Dexterity” and why it’s critical for future-ready educators.
- How rebel educators are building their own AI tools to solve real classroom problems.
- Why sometimes the best AI training happens on a plane or at a coffee shop!
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:01:08] Mike Yates’ journey from TFA rejection to leading its AI initiatives
[00:04:45] What teachers really want from AI—and why most solutions miss the mark
[00:07:28] AI at the human level: “You don’t have to speak Tech Bro to get on this train"
[00:14:05] From poetry slams to fashion design—creative ways educators are learning AI
[00:18:30] How rebel teachers are building their own EdTech tools after budget cuts
[00:23:37] Why AI as a trickster and debate partner makes learning more fun
[00:26:59] A sneak peek at the Reinvention Lab’s new initiative: Arcade AI
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[00:00:00] Mike Yates: I think teachers need to understand and they need to feel like they are a part of the revolution that's happening. A lot of the conversations like get on board or else, right? Instead of that messaging, it's like, Hey look, I'm gonna extend my hand to lift you on board and show you that you have a seat here.
You have a place here. Not like you don't have to speak Silicon Valley Tech bro. Talk. To get on this train right, you can be you on this train.
[00:00:29] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work.
[00:00:41] Ben Kornell: You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar and to go deeper.
For check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
[00:01:08] Alex Sarlin: We had the pleasure to speak to Mike Yates. Who is a Ed Tech Insider, MVP. He's a conference guru. He is an AI guru, and this is a really fun conversation. By way of intro, Mike Gates is a senior designer at Teach for America's r and d arm called the Reinvention Lab, bringing over 10 years of experience at the intersection of technology and learning.
His diverse background includes roles as a classroom teacher, a basketball coach. Founding team member of Alpha School, which is a Texas private school, designed to help kids complete their academics in two hours, and then build life skills through workshops and use technology in really innovative ways.
He's also a founding board member of Freedom Schools Fort Worth, and a co-founder of Guide. Enjoy this conversation with Mike Ys. Mike Yates. Welcome to EdTech Insiders. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to have you here. Your name just came up in a recent interview with Betsy Corcoran and Jeremy Rochelle, and they were saying how they had you on their new podcast, future Fluent, and you had all sorts of interesting things to say about AI and how teachers are using it.
So I'm really excited to chat with you again. I see you everywhere. We crossed paths and it's always fun to do hallway conversations with you, but I feel like you're a real, real EdTech insider. So let's dig into some of the things you're doing right now. First off. Give people a little bit of an overview of what you do with Teach for America.
People know Teach for America, but they may not know the TFA reinvention lab. What is that and how is it Reinventing TFA?
[00:02:37] Mike Yates: Yeah. Yeah. So the funniest story with how I got here is like I was actually in 2015, I was convinced that you could outsource parts of your school day to technology. I went where everybody told me to go with that idea.
I thought Teach for America was the place to come for innovation. So I went. I interviewed for TFA. I told them that in my interview and they pretty much stopped my interview short and rejected me from Teach for America in 2015. I ended up having a chance to build that type of school where we did replace certain aspects of the school day, even direct instruction with Adaptive Learning Technology or Khan Academies, freckles News.
I had a chance to build that school like four times over. So like while I was building the main thing, I was consulting with other projects. I did some homeschool co-op stuff, some stuff with families in Canada and all of that work along with building my own ed tech company, which eight years ago people called us crazy.
But we, I. Now we are able to feel really smart, even though eight years ago we wanted to beat TikTok to the life skills learning space. Mm. I had a co-founder who was, he was the Chief global evangelist at WeWork. Yeah.
[00:03:42] Alex Sarlin: And
[00:03:43] Mike Yates: he had seen Doen before anybody. And if you don't know, doen is Chinese TikTok. And he was like, dude, they're only learning on this app, so why don't we just.
Clone the app. So in the process of raising money for that, we sought out this grant program called Enduring Ideas that was run by this organization that I had never heard of called the Reinvention Lab. And on the call, one of the most amazing people, her name is Sunna, she says to me, Hey Mike, what are you doing next year for your like day job?
And I said, I'm a free agent. Six months later, I ended up. At the reinvention lab with, so the reinvention lab is Teach for America's RD Arm. We exist to, like, we build new products and programs to push Teach for America into the future of learning. And what's beautiful about our setup right now is that I'm saying the word push, but it's not like we're not pushing against resistance anymore.
Like the organization's like, please, here are our max push. So solutions, it's a cool one. Providing
[00:04:41] Alex Sarlin: solutions, right? That's what they call it. Yeah.
[00:04:43] Mike Yates: Yeah. Yeah. Fun place to be right now.
[00:04:45] Alex Sarlin: That sounds interesting. So you were doing ai, you were thinking about how teachers might lighten their administrative workload and start to think about incorporating technology into their everyday, many years before it was sort of on everybody's lips.
What does that look like today? I know you've partnered with PlayLab and one of your close colleagues at TFA reinvention lab is the CEO of PlayLab ai. Now you've partnered with Google and Snapchat. You're doing all sorts of interesting work in ai. What do you think it's gonna look like? What do teachers want and what have you been providing?
[00:05:17] Mike Yates: Yeah. I think right now what we're fighting is that teachers want two things. They want this whole like hodgepodge conversation around AI to be demystified for them. Yeah. Brought down to the level of, not even really the lay person, but the human level. Unfortunately, just like Metaverse and Web3 and all that, you have people that are grabbing for expertise when really they're newcomers to the field.
I tell people all the time, like there are experts in AI and there's probably about 30 of them, and they've been working on this for like 30 years. Right.
[00:05:46] Alex Sarlin: But everyone else has learned it six months ago from YouTube videos. Yeah,
[00:05:49] Mike Yates: exactly. Yeah. The rise of the EDU influencer in that respect, I think is harmful for teachers.
So we spent a lot of time demystifying it for them. That's what they're asking for. And the second thing that they were asking for is actually straight up support. They're like, look, teachers are telling me. Which I fly all across the world, training teachers on how to use ai. And they'll tell me straight up like, we know this is important.
We're not like denying that it's important. We know that our students will exist in this world where they have no choice but to embrace ai. But they're like, please tell me in my schedule of being counselor, doctor, lawyer, sometimes teacher, parent, when do I fit this AI training in? So they really want support in the training process.
So that's why. I remember the conversation. Literally, I spoke to my wife. I said, Hey, I think that to make this happen, I've gotta be on planes like three to four times a. And my wife is the reason for most of my success in life. So she was like, yeah, you're absolutely right. You should do that. And I went to our leadership at the reinvention lab and I was like, I think we gotta take a bet on in person.
Teachers are not gonna show up for virtual. They need somebody with them in the room to help them do those two things. So fortunately, we've been resourced to do it, and we're going into your backyard, so to speak, to help you learn.
[00:07:04] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, you're like a traveling evangelist and trainer of course. So I wanted to double click on something you said.
You said teachers want it brought down to the human level. Yeah. The like, how do I fit this in my day? How do I understand it? How do I make sense of it? How is it actually gonna help me and not be yet another time suck? Or another responsibility, another thing I feel guilty about not having time to do in my 54 hour work week.
What do you mean by the human level? I'd love to hear you unpack that.
[00:07:28] Mike Yates: So alone, I've trained around 7,000 educators. Wow. With no team. It's just like me traveling. And while that's been a grind, the most beautiful thing in the sun is like, I've gotten this really interesting look at what people are building and why they're building them.
And when I was in school, I never studied because. I took a numbers theory class where a teacher taught me how to hack test, and then I was really into, like at one point I wanted to be Jason Bourne, so I was like, wow. Studying to be in the CIA a And I learned that every person has a look on their face when they're really enjoying a thing, like a thing that they really get into.
So I would just look like, find that, look on a teacher's face and I'd be like, that's gonna be on the test. That's. Yeah, most of the time I was right about that. But I also do that in my workshops. Like whenever I watch people in a group and I watch someone light up and I'm like, ah, there it is. So that I make sure to go figure out what that person's building.
And what I know is that the solutions that people have been the most excited about building inside a play lab or Gemini or whatever tool have often been solutions that have nothing to do with their job. A great example, this is a couple of years ago at South by Southwest. I saw the look on this woman's face and she built a black owned coffee shop locator for her biking group.
She has this biking group called Black Girls Bike, and she's like, we need to stop and get a matcha, get some coffee. So that was the thing that she built. It was like, it's tapping into the part of herself that is most human right. It's not like my professional role as a teacher. And the other category that people get really, really excited about is something that's like, I kind of call it the goofball category 'cause it's.
They're doing something devious with their role as a teacher. A great example, there's a teacher named Ray. Ray is brilliant and funny and like his voice fills up the room. I just, I love being around him. He's up in Michigan and Ray built a tool a. It's a math tool for his students where the AI tries to trick the student intentionally.
And the only way you can move on through this sort of game that he's built is if you identify where the AI's trying to trick you. So those two categories of tools are like, that's what I'm seeing that people are sort of building in the field, getting really excited about. But that human piece of them, like that part of Ray's personality that came into that tool, like that's kinda what I mean.
It's also like. I think teachers need to understand and they need to feel like they are a part of the revolution that's happening. A lot of the conversations like get on board or else, right? Instead of that messaging, it's like, Hey look, I'm gonna extend my hand to lift you on board and show you that you have a seat here.
You have a place here. Not like you don't have to speak Silicon Valley Tech bro. Talk to get on this train, right? You can be you on this train.
[00:10:13] Alex Sarlin: And you don't have to sort of be brainwashed to go all the way and be like, okay, I'm going to use this for every single thing I do. You can actually pick and choose and pick the things you enjoy, pick the things that you're really excited about.
So you're mentioning teachers building tools, and I think that that's actually a really interesting piece because in my experience talking to people who are just learning ai. They often see it as almost like a search engine or it answers questions or you can chat with it. They sort of take the paradigm from internet or from search, sometimes from social media, but they don't often see themselves as like builders.
But I know that PlayLab is specifically about building and with Gemini gems or various types of tools, you can really quickly build ai. Tools, but the fact that you just sort of, that's comes so naturally to you, but I'd love you to talk a little bit about how you take that approach with teachers, that it's like build something you need or that you want, or that you think would be really fun and exciting, like on ai trickster bot.
[00:11:08] Mike Yates: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of the credit for this goes to use of mima who's. A co-founder, CEO of PlayLab. When we were working together in the reinvention lab, we had all of these philosophies around learning that we shared, which was why it was so fun to work together. And this is one of 'em that people learn by doing.
I remember the day that he showed me the first prototype of PlayLab and was like, yeah, we're trying to turn consumers into creators. And I was like, man, what a great tagline. So I said like, dude, let's go build the vehicle for it. And we built the play lab hackathon structure, which today it's really cool to see all sorts of people trying.
Hackathons with Play Lab or with other tools and like by no means did Yusef and I create the hackathon structure, but we did kind of popularize the Play Lab hackathon.
[00:11:51] Alex Sarlin: Oh yeah. I associate the concept of AI hackathon with you. I don't think that there are a whole lot of people going around doing AI hackathons in education at least.
Yeah,
[00:12:00] Mike Yates: I love that. I think there should be more, like we hope that there'll be more. But yeah, I mean, we held our first test in New York at Union Square Ventures. It was with a bunch of other people that we really, really liked. Dear friends, Caleb Hicks, who's at school, ai Garrett from SOAR Schools, all of us in a room together with students, teachers, and technologists.
We sort of watched this magic happen in the room, like the structure of it was kind of janky. We had to tweak the structure and how the facilitation worked. But at the end of the day, I watched a student. A educator and a former Twitter software engineer build a video tool that would transcribe your speech when you talk and it would use the transcription to give you suggestions on how to improve your speech.
Now, what's beautiful about it's that that exists, like. Many years ago when I was at Alpha, there was a person at Alpha that was like, I'm gonna give you a challenge, build a completely AI driven public speaking program. And the cool thing about Alpha that no one really talks about to this day is that back in the day when nobody knew who we were and we were intentionally very silent about what we were doing.
It was so much fun to work there because everything was a challenge. So if somebody in the field said, this thing is not possible, we, this little team would be like, let's try it. So I, I had built this completely AI driven. Public speaking program eight years ago. So I knew that like the thing that they built was possible and it existed already.
But I also knew that they had not found it. That they had not, and what they were excited to do with this tool, the fact that in two days they went from Here's Play lab to this is a video tool that's videoing and transcribing what you do. It was magical. So we knew we were onto something there. And then it was about anchoring around this idea of.
What we call AI dexterity at the reinvention lab. We've really, I think we've coined this term and like we've really pushed on the idea that people should be dextrous with AI and many other tech tools. And so AI is just another tool in your tool belt and you need to know how to use it and wield it whenever you need it to serve you and your community.
So,
[00:14:05] Alex Sarlin: yeah, and recognize opportunities to use it. I feel like that's a big one for people who are just learning, I'm doing this thing, wait a second. Do this very quickly or create a reusable tool to do this with AI in the same amount of time it would take me to do it right now. So,
[00:14:19] Mike Yates: and to know when you shouldn't use it.
Right. I had a very long conversation with a poet who I love and respect and I've gotten to spend a lot of time, I've gotten to spend like days and weeks with her before, and we had this very long conversation about why no one should ever. Use AI to write poems as I was formulating this AI poetry slam idea.
Yes. I was gonna ask you about Yeah, we can talk about, yeah. She was like, you should never, ever, so it's interesting, but you should know like when and when not to use tools.
[00:14:52] Alex Sarlin: Right, right. So you've opened the Can of Worms there. Tell us about what the AI Poetry Slam is and what you use it for in your trainings.
[00:14:59] Mike Yates: Yeah, so I'm glad I told that alpha story 'cause it kind of goes back there. Like my brain is trained to, especially when a person who is seen as an expert in a field says, don't do a thing or you can't do a thing. I'm like, I can figure it out.
[00:15:12] Alex Sarlin: So
[00:15:13] Mike Yates: the AI poetry slam was. Born out of me trying to, like I said, look, I trust the field to come up with all of the, what I think are the boring ways or the basic blocking and tackling.
Like I tell teachers all the time, magic School AI is spending all of their time and effort and money to build you the best lesson plan generator in the world. I don't wanna do that. Like they got that school. AI has that like trust that the field's gonna do that. But what I know Magic School AI will not do is.
Build a program to help you express your inner thoughts and your personality through poetry or, so basically I built four different. AI workshops that were non-conventional. So there was AI poetry, there was AI footwear design, there was AI for dress making, like Fashion Runway. And then there was this AI fantasy football companion that if I could find the right group of people, it will be really fun.
But it assigns like superpowers to every person in the league, and then it randomizes them every week. So like. It's a really fun way to play fantasy, but the Poetry Slam was something that we just tried at A-S-U-G-S-V.
[00:16:20] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. We
[00:16:20] Mike Yates: pulled in our, our great friend Timothy Jones from Hip Hop, ed Sunna, who's the executive director of the lab, and I, we just wanted to see what would happen if we, I.
Empowered people to essentially battle an AI poetry bot. What we started hearing was so beautiful. We thought, well, we have to keep trying this. Like at one point a person in the room said, I wasn't gonna read my poem, but then I. As I challenged this bot, I realized I have a voice and I'm gonna make it heard.
Wow. And like when you hear that, you get the chills and the goosebumps. Yeah. And like everyone in the room is like holding back tears and you're like, well, maybe this is something. Yeah. So what we've used it for is actually to have a conversation about AI ethics with people in a way that is not just a round table, in a way that's not a panel.
We've done an AI poetry slam at South by Southwest with, I have to shout her out with La Marx. She's an amazing poet. Lives in Louisville, Kentucky runs a group called Spoa where she will like come to a convention center and write people poems on the spot and we'll have like a person stationed to do the chat GPT poem, and then she'll write you one on a typewriter and hand it to you.
Just trying to get creative and out of the box with how we're using AI and how we're prompting people to think about ai. Yeah, the beautiful thing about being at Teach for America or being in the reinvention lab is that we have this cover from this large organization. So there are many times where we don't have to do what we think funders will.
Or even understand, and this was one of those things. This was like, we think this is like again, bringing AI to the human level for people because we think this is what they want and it was doing it in a creative way that we think is fine. So we'll probably do another AI poetry slam soon. You do these
[00:17:59] Alex Sarlin: trainings all over the country.
You said internationally too, and you mentioned that teachers are sort of hungry for it. At least they know they should be doing it. There's a reason to lean into it. They're not like standing there trying to hold it back and resist. I. The school systems are also starting to get to that point. Do you see a lot of like individual teachers who are like, I'm gonna use this even though we don't have a good policy and nobody knows how to use it?
Or are they like, my school's really trying to embrace this and I want to get on board. Like, I'm curious how you see that dynamic
[00:18:30] Mike Yates: playing out. For us, there's been way more of this rebel teacher, like the Rebel sort of using it, but I'll say like two years ago. It was inconceivable that, that a school would pay someone to come do AI training, and now we're starting to see demand for like.
Schools wanting to even pay for the, like the way that people are contacting me is totally different. Hey, we have budget and we wanna pay you to come do this thing. Instead of like, can you just show us what, yeah. There's been some incredible examples. Like the one I'll give is in Austin, Austin, ISD, here in Texas.
There was a group of teachers that attended a hackathon that I did inside the hackathon. They were part of the bilingual education department. They started basically rebuilding what Newsela is. And I said to them, Newsela is really great at this. And they said, oh yeah, we know, but our district just cut Newsela.
Yeah. So we now see that this is a way for us to rebuild that and get that value for, and I was like, wow, okay. So I was like, well, lemme know. Really interesting. Yeah. I'm like, let me know how it goes.
[00:19:31] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, a month
[00:19:32] Mike Yates: later they're like, Hey, just wanted to let you know how it's going. Our whole bilingual department's using this, and we need your help to figure out how to get our district to pay attention to this.
I was like, wow. Wow. We've seen the rebel educator have, I think, a, a profound impact on. Essentially like building a thing, extracting the value outta that and communicating that. And I think like school boards are getting on board. Like we just presented at the National Superintendent Convention. Schools are coming around to ai.
There's still some resistance. Like I've been on a plane and been told by the partner like, yo, get off the plane right now before it takes off. 'cause the district gets canceled on us. But.
[00:20:07] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Yeah, and I'm sure you've, with all 7,000 educators, you've seen every different variant, but it's, it's interesting to hear that the vibe has shifted over the last couple of years, and, and it makes sense.
I think that it's not only like in the zeitgeist generally, you just hear it over and over again, reading stories, seeing news stories about it for years now. But I think people are starting to have those aha moments that you're mentioning of like, oh, I saw a tool that actually I really liked or, or I built a tool, or I had a conversation, or I used it for something, finding coffee shops that suddenly like something clicked and I'm like, oh, this thing can actually do anything I want.
Like that's different. The example you just gave begs all sorts of questions about disruption of EdTech companies or, you know, as schools have streamlined budgets and they can't afford as much tech, are they gonna build it themselves? But we'll save that for a longer conversation. You think about AI so much and.
One thing you've mentioned that I really haven't heard from that many other people, but you've sort of, it's come up a couple times already, is the idea of ai, rather than being sycophantic and serving you, giving you the answers or, or helping you draft something or helping you write something, is sometimes you think of AI as a little bit of like a competitive spark.
It's like, oh, you're doing a poetry slam against ai. Or the teacher, you know, you mentioned, oh, we're, we're an AI trying to trick you, and you have to sort of get over on the AI and figure out what it's trying to do. I think that's really interesting and actually I feel like that's a, a direction we haven't seen much, but it could be something we see a lot more of.
It's just more interesting to have somebody trying to like play with you and mess with you than just do what you say, like, slavishly do it exactly what you want. What tell me, is that through line real? Like, am
[00:21:36] Mike Yates: I
[00:21:36] Alex Sarlin: hearing something there?
[00:21:37] Mike Yates: No one on my team knows this yet. So one of the people from the reinvention lab hear if I think of things as a good idea in the reinvention lab, they know this about me, that I will covertly build that thing.
[00:21:47] Alex Sarlin: I'm sure I can tell you, I know you well enough to know that you are. Yeah.
[00:21:51] Mike Yates: Yeah. So when I first got access to chat GPT, the first thing that I did was I started debating the ai. I was like, let me see how long it will spar with me. And at one point I remember Chachi PT saying. Something to the effect of like, we don't really need to debate about this.
And I was like, well that is a debate in itself. 'cause I think we do. And then it was so accommodating. It was like, oh actually you're right. I was like, nah, this isn't fun. I've approached it that way. It's like, what if teachers are already against this thing? What if you create the idea of AI as adversary, as a way to help them learn.
This is also kinda the way that I, I have four kids and we homeschool them all. Whenever they come up against a thing that's really challenging in their schooling, if I can turn that into the adversary, it's this innate thing that humans, it's like the cops and robbers, humans love heroes and villains.
The cover image that I have for this AI as adversary workspace that I'm nobody's seen is LeBron James in the black mask. Because that's how I think of it. Like when LeBron James wore the black, he like hit, hurt his face and he put on a black mask, which was illegal and he knew it was, and he got fined every day that he wore it.
But I was like, that's kind of the ethos that I want people to, you can do fun and slightly devious things that will help you learn. We've had this little challenge for people to do where it's Taylor Swift lost her voice and she has to go on the Today Show in an hour, clone her voice. Make it slightly goofier or make her say weird things.
I think people have more fun that way when it's less scholastic and more human. People have more fun.
[00:23:21] Alex Sarlin: I had an idea, I've been thinking about, you know, writing different things about AI for a long time and I, and I've been chatting with AI about it for a long time, trying to figure out different angles.
One of the angles was a book length debate about whether AI is good or bad for education with AI taking the con,
[00:23:37] Mike Yates: oh, it's so good. That's so needed, right? Yeah. Like. Ai figuring out how it is destructive to education.
[00:23:44] Alex Sarlin: Yes, because I'm always optimistic with people who listen to this podcast. I'm like, I think this is so much exciting stuff.
I try to ignore the integrity issue. I, I don't like dwelling on the what could go wrong stuff, but there's plenty of it. So I don't know. I love that idea of AI as adversary, as debate partner, as, as trickster, as somebody trying to pull you off of your path and you have to stay on it. I find that very motivating and I bet a lot of young people would
[00:24:06] Mike Yates: too.
One of the things that we started seeing when you put young people in front of an ai, a great example is we did an AI hackathon with the University of Texas football team. For me, it was a real moment because growing up in Texas, that team is in a lot of respects, more important than the pro team. Just if people don't know, and I always do this thing at the beginning where I'm like, all right, everybody stand up.
And that was the first time that I like instantly regretted it because they are so large. And I was like, sit.
As they worked on their tools, I remember one of them was like, this doesn't sound like my coach at all, and I, what do you need to do to, so he starts. Uploading text message conversations, uploading emails, and he is, this is what my coach sounds like, so sound like that. I've had students create insult bots.
The first thing they do is they bend the AI to be slightly evil. It's like evil Morty if, if anybody knows Rick Morty, you know, that's kinda how they position it. What I think is interesting about this is in the lab, one of the things that we have not historically spoken enough about publicly is that there are people.
Inside of the reinvention lab that have real questions about AI ethics, about whether you should use it at all. And one of the things that we've committed to in the future is striking this real balance by saying like, I am the person that is like, for, I'm more optimistic about it, similar to how you are.
And I'm also even a little more brash where I tell people like, yo, I appreciate that you have objections, but I want you to know that Sam Altman doesn't care. Exactly. Elon Musk's not thinking about your objections. Their mind is in 2075 today. Yeah. But I do think that that messaging. It can't resonate with everybody.
Like there has to be spaces where you do sit around and you have to talk about what it means, even if it's just, you know, a cathartic experience where you're just able to release and then go build something cool.
[00:25:59] Alex Sarlin: I have also found that when people have this like really gut hard reaction against it, often it's because they've have this idea of what it is and they haven't actually.
Really been sat with it for an hour and talked to it or built something or found any meaningful use case. They think about it as like this scary entity, very abstract entity. And then of course people who use it a lot have different concerns. They're like, wait a second, there's some things this could do that could be not so great.
We gotta think about it. But there's different kind of complaints and I'm, I'm sure you, you see both with your rebel teachers and people who have been just like, people are excited about it. People who are. Every part of the learning curve. I wish we had more time. We should follow up on this conversation and do some more.
Maybe we could, maybe we could do 'em with, uh, Yusef, because I think it would be fun. Absolutely. About some of that stuff. Where should people go if they wanna know more about what TFA reinvention lab is doing or wanna come to any of these events? These poetry slams, the shoe design. How do they follow your work?
[00:26:51] Mike Yates: You can find us on all socials at Reinvention Lab. I guess this is the good enough time visiting to announce we are building an AI sub-brand.
[00:26:59] Alex Sarlin: Ooh.
[00:27:00] Mike Yates: That is called Arcade ai. Nice. And it launches on Monday. March 17th. So aade AI will, the main social media that you'll be able to find us on is the Reinvention Lab's, TikTok.
So we'll be heavily using TikTok, but we'll also be on Instagram. Right now. LinkedIn is the place to find the most information about what the Reinvention Lab is doing, whether it's mine or. The Reinvent Labs, LinkedIn, look out for arcade ai. 'cause we'll be doing a lot of fun stuff with that.
[00:27:26] Alex Sarlin: Sweet. That's awesome.
I can't wait to see what you do next. I, I just feel like you're thinking in much broader and more creative ways about AI in schools than many people in the space. And I'm really excited that there's somebody doing that work and literally willing to get on planes and fly all over the country and sit down with leaders and students and, and teachers and say, Hey, try this Mike Gates, TFA reinvention lab.
And if you're going to, you know, A-S-U-G-S-V. Anything Mike is doing there is worth stopping by. He, we've called him the MVP of some of these conferences in the past. He's just like the ultimate connector, always doing interesting things. So yeah. There you go. Mike Gates. Thanks for being here on EdTech Insiders.
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