Playful Rigor, Ethical Practice: Introducing the Prompt-a-thon Workshop
By Dr Javier Mármol Queraltó and Mr. Peter Boorman at the University of Southampton
With Generative AI (GenAI) now a part of everyday academic life, we need to equip our students with critical thinking skills to make informed and ethical decisions about their responsible use of AI.
Over the last year, at the University of Southampton, we have been creating, developing and piloting a format that helps staff and students build their digital literacy. Prompt-a-thon is a team-based event that blends the energy of a hackathon with the reflective depth of professional development. Grounded in sound pedagogy, the event sees teams compete to create, refine and evaluate prompts and outputs using supported tools, while engaging in reflective conversations about responsible use, and discipline-specific tasks.
As a Russell Group university, Southampton has long championed researched education. We also have an active role in contributing to sector wide ethical guidance on GenAI through the Russell Group’s joint principles for responsible adoption, which commit institutions to AI literacy, ethical use, academic integrity, and collaboration. These principles inform our local guidance for staff and students and underpin the approach you’ll experience in this workshop.
Why this workshop?
The Prompt-a-thon event scaffolds a cycle of: understanding GenAI tools → building prompts → evaluating outputs, so participants learn to spot strengths and weaknesses quickly (accuracy, sourcing, bias, scope), apply guardrails, and improve outputs rather than accept them at face value. That is exactly the kind of AI literacy Russell Group principles call for: skills development within an ethical framework.
Our prompt-a-thon pilots have shown that providing a safe, fun environment for students to play
with AI builds their confidence and their understanding of responsible use, including academic integrity.
Participants’ confidence in using GenAI for academic work rose substantially from before to after the event, with the shift reaching statistical significance.
Confidence in using GenAI responsibly also increased significantly, suggesting that explicit ethical framing and evaluation routines make a tangible difference.
Students described the experience as moderately to highly engaging and said it met their expectations.
What we will explore in this workshop:
How do you provide pedagogical sound learning for students to develop their AI literacy skills?
We will explore the model we have created to provide students with a hands-on learning experience allowing them to develop their digital literacy in a fun and engaging way. Drawing on principles of gamification, the Prompt-a-thon provides an introduction to GenAI grounded in the sector’s shared principles of AI literacy, equitable access, integrity, collaboration, and ethical use.
What does ethical and responsible use of AI look like when applied to subject specific academic learning?
Students worry about using AI correctly within their academic work. We introduce responsible use through structured and critical practice with the PREP-EDIT prompting framework (Fitzpatrick et al., 2023). In our pilot data, concerns about reliability were common pre-event; our evaluation practices address them head-on and coincide with the post-event uplift in confidence.
What scaffolds help learners move from curiosity to competence?
We will share the Prompt-a-thon structure and scaffolding of the PREP-EDIT framework within the event sequencing, which is reflected in our use of rubrics and tasks and makes the invisible parts of ethical reasoning visible and measurable.
A quick teaser: Prompt–a–thon ‘Express’
You will experience a bite sized version of the format through two lightning challenges:
Accurate, biased, or everything in between? Participants will reflect on accuracy and biases inherent in GenAI tools by creating their own virtual avatars.
Structured creativity. Participants will engage with the PREP-EDIT framework by working through our introductory activity, used during the Prompt-a-thon.
Expect some technical descriptions, playful scoring, and a reflective debrief that discusses what worked (and what did not!). The goal is introducing you to the Prompt-a-thon and providing an understanding of how you could apply it within your context.
What you will take away
A replicable format. You will leave with an outline you can adapt to your context and ideas for activities you can try with your students. The format is purpose-built to build digital literacy.
A practical prompting routine. A simple test, evaluate and reflect loop (inspired by established prompting frameworks) that helps you plan better prompts, check outputs for accuracy, bias, and responsibly use AI.
Evidence you can use. From our pilot student survey:
Overall confidence using GenAI increased significantly from pre- to post-event.
Confidence in using GenAI responsibly also rose substantially.
Participants rated the event as engaging and that it met expectations.
Alignment with sector principles. Everything you try in the room maps to the Russell Group’s principles—AI literacy, ethical use, academic integrity, and cross sector collaboration—and to Southampton’s own guidance, so you can take the model home with confidence.
Resources and ideas we will draw on
Russell Group principles for the ethical use of GenAI in education (AI literacy; ethical use and equal access; academic integrity; collaboration). We will show what these look like in practice, from prompt planning to disclosure of language.
University of Southampton guidance on using GenAI in studies, clear expectations, examples of acceptable support, and a focus on critical digital literacy. We will map workshop activities to this guidance so you can see a coherent policytopractice line.
Industry-wide tools. We will work with Microsoft Copilot so the practices can transfer
to your day-to-day.
Evidence from our pilot (pre/post surveys, light significance testing, and thematic analysis of open responses) to show where the format is having impact and where we are iterating next.
Who should attend?
Academic staff who want practical ways to build GenAI literacy while protecting academic integrity.
Learning designers and educational technologists seeking a replicable, evidence informed format.
Programme and policy leads who need to align course level practice with institutional and sector principles.
Curious beginners who want a psychologically safe, structured way to get hands-on quickly.
Bring your curiosity and we will create a safe, fun space to play.
If you’re interested in how to reimagine enhancement in your own institution, I hope to see you at ALTC25. And if not, I look forward to connecting here or online afterward.
ALT’s Annual Conference is one of the UK’s largest conferences for learning technology and digital education professionals. The conference provides a valuable and practical forum for practitioners, researchers, managers and policy-makers from education and industry to solve problems, explore, reflect, influence and learn.
ALTC25 will take place in Glasgow on 23 and 24 October 2025. Register closes 20 October 2025.