How IB137 Ignites Teenagers’ Cognition

The text details the development and architecture of IB137, a specialised two-day Human+AI workshop designed by Greg Twemlow to activate the latent cognitive capacity of Year 10–11 adolescents. This program evolved from an earlier workshop that demonstrated unpredictable "ignition moments," aiming instead to establish a reliable system for cognitive clarity accessible to every student. Structural changes underpin the success, including replacing larger teams with small, accountable Pods and employing a 137 Cognitive Ignition moment to reset the learning environment and suspend typical school expectations. Crucially, the workshop positions AI as a cognitive scaffold—a tool that reflects and stabilises student thinking by surfacing ambiguities and strengthening reasoning, rather than generating solutions. This support enables the central phase of Human+AI Idea Synthesis, where students build a unified, defensible solution and gain earned cognitive confidence through rigorous analysis and critique. Twemlow employs the oloid metaphor to illustrate that the students' capacity is revealed only when the structured movement of the entire workshop is in motion. Read the article.

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