Describe your topic, your audience, and the outcome you want from the exercise to Claude, and it will generate a complete interactive activity — including instructions, timing, debrief questions, and what success looks like — in under a minute.
What Makes an Exercise Actually Interactive
Interactive doesn’t mean busy. An exercise where participants fill out a template while you wait is not interactive — it’s quiet individual work. A truly interactive exercise requires participants to make a decision, share a perspective, respond to someone else, or apply a concept to their own situation. The difference between an exercise that energizes a room and one that deflates it is usually that second element: the sharing or responding. AI helps you build that structure into every exercise from the start.
The Prompt That Works
Give Claude a complete picture: “Design a 10-minute interactive exercise for a live Zoom workshop on [topic]. My participants are [audience description]. The goal is for them to [specific outcome]. Include step-by-step instructions, a timing breakdown, one debrief question, and a note on what I should watch for as a facilitator.” This level of specificity produces a usable exercise rather than a vague suggestion — and it takes under 60 seconds to generate.
Claude is especially good at designing exercises that work in Zoom’s breakout room format: pair conversations, small group challenges, or “build and share” activities where each group produces something they present back to the main room. These formats work consistently with adult learners because they create accountability — participants know they’ll be sharing their output, so they engage more fully with the task.
If the first exercise doesn’t quite fit, give Claude one piece of feedback: “Make it shorter,” “make it more challenging,” or “the audience won’t have enough context for this — simplify the scenario.” It adjusts in one pass. You don’t need to redesign from scratch.
What This Means for Educators
As a trainer or coach, well-designed exercises are the difference between a workshop people talk about afterward and one they forget before they close the Zoom window. AI doesn’t replace your judgment about what your specific students need — you still decide what outcome the exercise should produce. But it eliminates the blank-page problem of designing activities from scratch, which is one of the most time-consuming parts of workshop preparation.
What to Do Next
Before your next session, use Claude to design one new exercise you have never tried before. Give it the full context, iterate once if needed, and try it live. Most educators who do this are surprised by how quickly they get something workshop-ready — and how much more their students engage when the activity is structured to require real participation rather than passive completion.