You have probably used one. You might have asked it to write a lesson plan, simplify a tricky paragraph, or generate quiz questions. But when a student asks you “how does ChatGPT actually work?” what do you say?
This interactive explainer breaks the whole thing down in six steps.
No calculus, no code just enough intuition to explain AI confidently in a staff meeting or a Year 9 lesson.
If you have not yet explored our 15 AI buzzwords glossary, that is a great companion piece for the language side of the same conversation.
The six steps
Work through them in order, or jump to the one that interests you most:
- Tokens — text broken into chunks the AI can process
- Embeddings — how words become numbers
- Attention — click any word to see what it “looks at” (fully interactive)
- Layers — how understanding builds from spelling to meaning
- Prediction — the probability table behind every response
- Training — where all the knowledge came from
Produced by AI Awareness Day · aiawarenessday.co.uk
How to use this with students
Work through one step per lesson starter, or assign pairs to explain step 3 (attention) to the class using their own example sentence.
Ask: where could this model still get things wrong?
That leads naturally into hallucinations and human-in-the-loop from the buzzwords list.
Put the pipeline in order
Drag each definition into the correct step — or use the arrows on mobile. When you have finished the explainer above, this is a quick check that the sequence sticks.
Tip: drag cards or tap ↑ ↓ to reorder. Position numbers show the slot (1 = first step in the pipeline).
