Sandbox

One idea each. Until mid-July.

A confession: I drafted a single issue with 16-20 AI experiments stacked inside it. It was honest, useful, and unreadable.

Nobody opens an email at the end of May and thinks yes, give me 16+ things to try right now. You skim. You bookmark. You never come back. I know because I do it too.

So here’s what’s happening instead.

For the next set of issues I will be writgin and sharing short, focused, one idea at a time issues. I’m running a series called Sandbox. Each issue picks one prompt, link, or AI experiment and goes deeper on it than a bullet list ever could. The plan from now until mid-July: a small thing to try, a story about how I tried it, and a nudge for what you might build.

The frame is play. Not productivity. Not transformation. Not unlock the power of AI for your district. Just: open a tab, try one thing, see what happens, tell me what you made.

Here’s why the format matters more than the content. End-of-year brains can’t process a curriculum. They can process a recipe. So one recipe, one per issue, is the only version of this that actually gets used. Anything denser becomes the AI equivalent of a binder on the shelf.

A few things to expect:

The experiments will range from work to life. Spreadsheets you’ve been avoiding. Posters of your hometown. A printable recipe from a YouTube video. A research-backed framework for staff PD. The first one, dropping next, is a real example using my own data of 25 Dave Matthews Band concerts logged across 17 years. Yes, really.

Each issue closes with a prompt for you. Share what you made. I’ll feature the best builds in future issues of the prompts, the posters, the charts, the cards, whatever you tried. The series gets better when it includes what you tried.

Skip the ones that don’t fit your week. The series is a buffet, not a class. The point is the muscle, not the completion rate. Run two well and you’ll get more out of it than a reader who powers through all sixteen.

The bigger argument underneath the whole series: the AI move worth making isn’t using more tools. It’s building the muscle to know when one of them is the right tool for a specific moment in your work or life. That muscle gets built by trying small things, often, with low stakes. Not by reading another think piece about it.

Grab your coffee. The first one drops next.

— A-A-Ron

P.S. If there’s an AI tool, prompt, or experiment you want me to put in the lineup, hit reply or drop it in the comments. I’m building the back half of the series partly from what readers send in.