Vibe coding for teachers means describing what you want and letting AI write the code. 2021 Kentucky Teacher of the Year Donnie Piercey shares how any teacher can build custom classroom tools, games, and translators — no coding skills needed.
Vibe coding. But what is vibe coding? And is it something a teacher can do to save time and make life easier? Fourth grade teacher Donnie Piercey shows us how.
From creating some super cool buttons inside Google Docs to make personal task cards for his fourth graders, to ideas on review games, vibe coding is something we can all do. If you want to understand how to start, this will be a great show to listen to. Good luck! And if you’re vibe coding, leave a comment or reach out to me on social media — I want to collect some stories to share!
Sponsor. Today’s show is sponsored by EF Educational Tours and their Career Readiness Tours. Lead your students on an international EF Career Readiness tour and show them what a career in fields like agriculture, hospitality, or automotive engineering could look like. Imagine your students connecting with entrepreneurs at the London School of Economics, getting a behind-the-scenes look at Toyota’s manufacturing in Japan, or touring a French culinary school to see future chefs in action. If you’ve been trying to break through to your students and show them how to turn their career dreams into reality, browse EF’s collection of Career Readiness tours at eftours.com/ready.
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Vibe Coding for Teachers: No Coding Skills Needed with Donnie Piercey
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Key Takeaways for Teachers from Donnie Piercey
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🐾 The Research: Is Vibe Coding for Teachers a Real Thing?
As of June 2026, “vibe coding” in classrooms is new and moving fast. The sources below are early reports and expert interviews — a starting point for thinking it through, not settled, peer-reviewed research. I verified each one against its original before linking it.
A Harvard professor calls it “the democratization of creation”
Sweet, J. (2026, April 1). ‘Vibe coding’ may offer insight into our AI future. Harvard Gazette — interview with Karen Brennan, Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Practice in Learning Technologies, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Source
Key finding: Brennan taught a six-week vibe-coding course to 92 students with no coding prerequisite. Her core takeaway: vibe coding makes building software accessible to people without a CS degree, and many tools let you “peek under the hood” and learn from the code you create together with AI.
Caveat: Brennan also warns that vibe coding “privileges people who are strong verbal communicators” (an equity concern), that students got stuck in frustrated loops when they couldn’t articulate what they wanted, and that it’s often optimized for “how much wow can I get in the next hour” rather than quality.
My takeaway:We know that we heard this with social media, however, this is different in that you can create apps and code. That said, in my experience, my students who had a little bit of Python coding became better at coding, faster. That said, vibe coding is something that can be done without any coding experience. I do think her note that strong communicators have an edge. Words, thinking, and communication are vitally important in a world where words create. Worth a read!
One district expects to save about $220K a year by building its own tools
Klein, A. (2026, May 8). A District Expects to Save $200K From AI-Powered ‘Vibe Coding.’ Here’s How. Education Week. Source
Key finding: Washington’s Peninsula school district used Claude Code to build its own classroom and operations tools (including a lesson-feedback tool called LessonLens). The district’s CIO estimates vibe coding may save around $220,000 a year by replacing some commercial subscriptions with tools built in-house in hours.
Caveat: This is one district’s projection, and Peninsula has former software developers on staff. UMass Amherst learning-technology professor Torrey Trust warns AI-generated code can introduce more security vulnerabilities and bugs than a human would — and districts handling sensitive student data (IEPs, health info) must be especially careful. Keep student PII out of vibe-coded tools, exactly as Donnie does when he strips student names before uploading.
Where the term came from
Karpathy, A. (2025, February 2). Post defining “vibe coding” on X. The term was named Collins English Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2025. Source
Key finding: AI researcher Andrej Karpathy coined “vibe coding” in February 2025 to describe writing software by describing your intent in plain language and letting the AI generate the code — guiding, testing, and giving feedback rather than typing the code yourself.
Caveat: “Vibe coding” covers a spectrum from quick classroom prototypes (what this episode is about) to production software, where professional engineers stay responsible for understanding, security, and maintainability. For a teacher building a review game, that’s fine; for anything touching real student data, it isn’t.
News of Note:AI forums are abuzz with Andrej Karpathy joining Anthropic recently. He is really a mover in the AI space and his thinking matters to many. He shares mostly on Twitter – for some reason I’m having trouble pasting in the link but it is @karpathy.
🐾 How I used AI on this post: I used AI to help draft and format these show notes and to gather and fact-check the three sources above against their original articles. The classroom ideas are Donnie’s, the conversation is ours, and the editorial choices and final review are mine. — Vicki
About Donnie Piercey
Donnie Piercey is the 2021 Kentucky Teacher of the Year and teaches in Lexington, Kentucky. After graduating from Asbury College and earning his master’s from Auburn Montgomery, he has been teaching at a public school in Kentucky since 2007. Donnie specializes in using technology to promote student inquiry, learning, and engagement.
Over the past nineteen years of teaching, these interests have given him the unique chance to represent Kentucky and his students around the world. He was invited to the White House to meet with the President in 2021. He runs a podcast called Teachers Passing Notes that is produced by the Peabody Award winning company, GZMShows. He was the recipient of a National Geographic Grosvenor Teacher Fellowship to Antarctica, and he also represents Kentucky on the inaugural National Geographic Teacher Advisory Council. He was the first North American lead for the Google Earth Education Experts Network, and he was the first teacher in Kentucky to become both a Google Certified Innovator and a Google Certified Trainer. In 2017, he co-authored The Google Cardboard Book: Explore, Engage, and Educate with Virtual Reality based on virtual experiences he created for his students.
Donnie’s recent work in AI and education has earned him multiple appearances on Good Morning America, the Associated Press, and PBS. His book, 50 Strategies for Integrating AI into the Classroom (Teacher Created Materials), is written for educators looking for practical classroom approaches to using AI to revolutionize their teaching and enrich their students’ learning.
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Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki
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Vicki Davis: Today’s show is sponsored by EF Educational Tours and their Career Readiness Tours. To show your students what careers look like up close and in action, go to eftours.com/ready and stay tuned at the end of the show to learn more.
Our guest today, Donnie Piercey, is about to set the record for being on my show the most. I ran into Donnie Piercey again at FETC. We were both featured speakers in the teacher track, and he is the 2021 Kentucky Teacher of the Year. He teaches fourth grade in Lexington, Kentucky, and is in his 20th year. We’re going to talk about vibe coding. How do you simply explain what this vibe coding thing is? And is it something that a normal teacher can do?
Donnie Piercey: Well, a hundred percent. Vibe coding almost sounds like — gosh, is this a new computer language? Is this a new thing that I have to pretend like I know what I’m talking about, but I can just throw the jargon phrase around and people think I’m smart? In a nutshell, what it is, is you use an AI tool — whether that’s Google Gemini, ChatGPT, or Base44.
Basically you just go into one of those tools, pick your preferred one, tell it that you want to write code that does blank, and sometimes it might ask you some follow-up questions, but it’ll write the code for you. And that’s nothing new — that’s existed in AI really since ChatGPT launched. But what’s different now is you can do the follow-up. Now you can say, “I have this code, I have no idea what I’m doing, can you tell me what I’m supposed to do with this? Where does it go?” And the AI tool will walk you through it.
Vicki Davis: So, Donnie, I was struggling to teach my eighth graders last semester. I used all the regular tools that we subscribe to and I was not happy — I had to retest and retest. Well, this semester I took all that content and uploaded it to my favorite AI tool of choice. It was really, really cold recently, and we’re the Eagles. I wanted it to be about keeping the eagle from freezing on the nest — the more questions you got right, the more it warmed the nest up and saved the eagle. But here’s the thing that happened: I had no retest. The kids made five points higher on average than last semester. It was once and done, and they loved it and they had fun. I was sitting there watching them play it and I could see the results right there. It was like — this is something that is a game changer.
Donnie Piercey: We probably all have that one friend who just knows coding, and every now and then we might text them or send them a screenshot like, “Hey, I’m trying to get this HTML code to work.” They’d write back, “Just fix this part,” or make some snarky Nick Burns “your company computer guy” comment. But now, with AI, we don’t have to pester that person anymore. What’s wild is — vibe coding’s not perfect. Believe it or not, AI makes mistakes. Sometimes the code it writes won’t run, and it’ll display an error message. It still kind of breaks my brain sometimes. But then I realized — why don’t I just screenshot the error message and copy and paste it into Gemini or ChatGPT and say, “Hey, the code you wrote, it ain’t working. It’s giving me this message. Can you fix your code?”
But here’s the thing — I like to learn how to do stuff. So anytime I do that, I’m always trying to read through what it says, because eventually I’d like to get to the point where I don’t always have to copy and paste everything. Nowadays I’m a lot better than I was two and a half years ago when I first started. I’ll say, “Hey, it’s giving me this error message — make sure you tell me why, what’s wrong, so that if I see this again I know how to fix it in the future.” Because sometimes it’s just a bracket in the wrong place. It’s really fun, super cool to play around with.
Vicki Davis: Okay, so give us some examples of things that have impacted your day in your classroom using vibe coding.
Donnie Piercey: My first advice for teachers is to ask yourself: what is one small thing — an app or a tool — that if you could make a Google Doc do this, or a Google Slide do that, it would make your day a thousand times easier? Identify that small problem, jump into Gemini, and say, “Hey, I need this to happen. Here’s the problem. Can you write some code for me?” When I was first starting out, I’d always put a little addendum on the end — “and I have no idea what I’m doing, so please don’t use any technical jargon, just tell me where to copy and paste this.”
So, a simple example. I’m a full-time fourth grade teacher. I do whole-group reading, whole-group math, then small-group reading and small-group math. If I’m not meeting with a small group, the other 20-plus students always want to know what they’re supposed to be doing. In the past I’d have a slideshow broken down by groups and times. I took a screenshot of just one of my task lists — and I removed student names because I refused to train the model — and said, “I want a printable to-do list for my students every day based off of this.” It said, “Sure — make a sheet, make a slide template,” and it actually formatted the Google Sheet for me, which was wild. And then it said, “Now you’re going to make some Google Apps Script,” which still makes me laugh because it abbreviates to GAS. It walked me through it step by step.
Now, at the start of every day, before I leave, I open the spreadsheet, type in the assignments I want my students to do, click a little button, and it creates these printable task lists for me. I put about an hour’s worth of work into it, but it has saved me countless hours of printing task lists — and parents love that these things get sent home every day, too.
Maybe you’ve got your weekly classroom newsletter in Google Slides. There’s no native translate tool in Google Slides, but there is Google Apps Script you can add. In my classroom this year I’ve got five different languages — some not even easily in Google Translate. Ask it to create Google Apps Script for your newsletter — “I want it where, when I click this button, it takes what’s on slide one, translates it into those five languages, and then I can print it all off or email it in one fell swoop.” I’ve been playing around with vibe coding now for over two years. I know a thousand times more now than when I asked it to write a simple Frogger game in HTML with emojis. Now you can actually make stuff, and it’s fun.
Vicki Davis: A lot of these things you can publish to HTML and then put the link in — or publish to all different types of things so it could be a game a kid could play. I uploaded all my stats from my podcast and made an HTML dashboard, and had it tag every single one based on topic. I can pull up the top five in this topic, top five in that topic — it makes it really easy to figure out, “Hey, this might be a great one to add to a radio show I’m doing.” It’s just so powerful. It’s stuff I’ve never had access to before, whether I’m at school or at home. Are there other ideas you’ve seen teachers do?
Donnie Piercey: You can ask Gemini to write HTML code for you. Maybe you’re a high school teacher and you want your students to balance equations — ask it to write script or HTML code you can copy and paste or embed onto a Google Site, and then send that site to your students. I like to be silly sometimes — that’s how you learn how this works. My first website that I wrote and published from start to finish — go to GIFdebate.com. That’s G-I-F-debate.com. It’s a site I put together that finally answers the question of how to pronounce that word correctly.
Vicki Davis: I use Claude Cowork and have created some skills. I dictate voice memos on the way to school. I used to do a transcript and then try to do something with it, but now I just throw it in a folder, and I have a custom skill I run every morning that turns it into multiple things for me. It’s just so powerful, whatever tool you want to use. I’d say start easy. Starting with HTML is a good way to start for teachers, or for whoever. And honestly, I just upload the HTML file in Google Classroom and it works just fine.
Donnie Piercey: You can just open it up in Chrome and it works exactly like it’s supposed to. For your listeners, if they’re thinking “that sounds way too complicated,” go to whatever tool you use —
Vicki Davis: You can go to Canva Code, even. It works.
Donnie Piercey: Yeah. You just say, “Write me a simple game that checks to see if my students know their multiplication facts.” It’ll write the code, and you’re probably like, “I have no idea what to do with this.” So your follow-up should be, “I have no idea what to do with this. I want my students to be able to play this game now — what do I do?” And it’ll walk you through it step by step. It’s really wild how scarily easy it is. It’ll also teach you a little more about the creative process that goes into coding. At first you’ll feel like the AI is doing everything, but eventually — “I don’t need to ask it to change this number, I can just do this here, I can hop in the code myself.”
Vicki Davis: It’s great for our students to be able to understand how to create the apps and tools they need for their lives. When they get to the level I teach — high school — I teach AP CSP, and I want my students to be able to describe the programs they want. I really think AP CSP is one of the most valuable courses because — and I’m biased, of course — it enables powerful vibe coding when you understand just a little bit. So, Donnie Piercey, so many things we could go into. You’re one of my favorite teachers to see present at conferences, and it was great connecting with you at FETC. Thanks for the show again — I’ll have to get you a t-shirt or something.
Donnie Piercey: Just look up the Saturday Night Live five-timers club — you need a little card or a smoking jacket. Awesome. I appreciate it. Thank you, Vicki.
Vicki Davis: Thanks for coming on the show, Donnie.
Teachers, show your students what a career actually looks like — not in a textbook, but in the real world. On an EF Career Readiness Tour, your students will connect with entrepreneurs at the London School of Economics, or go behind the scenes at Toyota’s manufacturing plant in Japan, or tour a French culinary school to see future chefs in action. EF Career Readiness Tours can take your students around the world for hands-on industry experience you can’t replicate in the classroom. Browse EF Career Readiness Tours at eftours.com/ready. That’s eftours.com/ready — and make careers come alive through travel.
Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a sponsored episode and blog post. EF Educational Tours has compensated me to share information about their Career Readiness Tours. However, all opinions expressed are my own. I have personally reviewed these resources and only recommend tools I believe offer genuine value to classroom teachers. My endorsement is limited to the educational products and services discussed in this episode. This post also contains affiliate links to books on Amazon; if you purchase through them, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” The sponsor has no impact on the editorial content of this show.
Frequently Asked Questions About Vibe Coding for Teachers
What is vibe coding for teachers?
Vibe coding means describing what you want in plain English and letting an AI tool write the code for you. For teachers, it’s a way to build small, custom classroom tools — task lists, translators, review games — without learning a programming language. You tell the AI what you need, it generates the code, and you keep refining it until it works.
Do I need to know how to code to try vibe coding?
No. That’s the whole point. You don’t need a computer science background — you describe the problem in everyday language and the AI handles the code. Donnie Piercey’s tip for beginners is to add a line like, “I have no idea what I’m doing, so don’t use technical jargon — just tell me where to copy and paste this.” A Harvard Graduate School of Education professor calls this “the democratization of creation”: you can build a tool without a CS degree.
What AI tools can teachers use for vibe coding?
Common tools mentioned in this episode include Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Base44, and Canva Code. For tools that connect to Google Workspace — like turning a Google Sheet into printable task lists or adding a translate button to Google Slides — Google Apps Script is the free scripting layer that makes it work.
What can teachers actually build with vibe coding?
Real classroom examples from the episode: a button that turns a spreadsheet into printable daily student task lists, a classroom newsletter that auto-translates into five languages, a self-checking review game (Vicki built one that raised her eighth graders’ scores five points with no retests), and simple HTML activities like a multiplication-facts game or an equation-balancing tool you can drop into Google Classroom or a Google Site.
What do I do when the AI’s code doesn’t work?
Screenshot or copy the error message, paste it back to the AI, and say, “The code you wrote isn’t working — here’s the message. Can you fix it, and tell me why so I’ll know next time?” Asking the AI to explain the fix is how you gradually learn to troubleshoot on your own instead of always copying and pasting.
Is vibe coding safe to use with student data?
Be careful. Keep personally identifiable student information out of vibe-coded tools — Donnie strips student names before uploading anything so he doesn’t train the model on them. Experts share this caution: University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Torrey Trust notes that AI-generated code can introduce more security vulnerabilities and bugs than a human would, and districts handling sensitive data (IEPs, health records) should be especially cautious. Use vibe coding for tools that touch only non-sensitive, publicly available information.
How do I start vibe coding in my classroom?
Start small. Ask yourself: what is one small thing that, if a Google Doc or Google Slide could do it, would make your day a thousand times easier? Take that single problem to an AI tool, describe it plainly, and ask it to write the code — then ask it to walk you through where to put it. Donnie put about an hour into his first tool and it has saved him countless hours since.
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