Section A: Project Information
AutoMate is an all-in-one platform that acts as a highly efficient friend and assistant for teachers and administrators seeking to innovate the current pedagogy with AI tools regardless of their current knowledge in learning technology. For teachers, all they need to do is just uploading their course outline, including school-wide learning objectives. Using a combination of Generative AI and AI agents, AutoMate helps teachers save a significant amount of time for lesson preparation (according to locally conducted studies, close to 2 hours per day and still on an increasing trend due to digitalization of education) automatically generates lesson-by-lesson new teaching ideas that align with the course and school-wide objectives with full lesson resources (multimedia, collaborative activities, relevant self-access AI activities, slides and worksheets, etc.) It also allows teachers to specify a part of the lesson that needs additional ideas and resources for enhanced interactivity, collaboration, differentiated instructions for diverse learning needs. With its shareable features, AutoMate allows teachers to instantly share and rate these resources within teaching teams, promoting collaborative professional pedagogical development. Administrators benefit from tools that track how school-wide objectives are being addressed within and across subjects, while feedback data from resource sharing and ratings guides staff development and builds a school-based shared resource base that can be shared with the affiliated schools or for pedagogical exchange with the other schools and organizations. By leveraging user data, AutoMate continuously adapts to generate increasingly relevant and innovative ideas, ensuring long-term alignment with educational goals of the school.
Section B: Participant Information
| Title | First Name | Last Name | Organisation/Institution | Faculty/Department/Unit | Phone Number | Contact Person / Team Leader | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ms. | Kit Lam Eunice | Tang | The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology | Center for Language Education | lceunicetang@ust.hk | 23588150 |
Section C: Project Details
The idea of AutoMate was inspired by the gap in AI readiness among Hong Kong teachers, as highlighted in an SCMP article (“Hong Kong schools don’t have enough teachers trained in AI, sector veterans say”, 2025). This issue is compounded by the rapid evolution of AI educational technologies, leaving teachers struggling to keep with new tools and their updates. Cheng and Wang (2023) stated the cause for many teachers lacking enthusiasm for applying AI in teaching as their being unable to keep up with the rapid development of AI technologies. While basic prompts can generate teaching ideas, many face another obstacle of lacking the time or expertise to create comprehensive AI-facilitated teaching resources. Therefore, I am interested in creating a platform that address such challenging by offering an accessible, user-friendly platform that simplifies the process of generating AI-assisted innovative teaching ideas and resources. According to Venkatesh & Bala (2008), if teachers believe that the technology is easy to use and useful, they are more willing to use it. AutoMate empowers all teachers to implement AI-assisted pedagogies without requiring prior knowledge of AI or extensive time investments. At the same time, it provides schools with actionable insights through data analysis, enabling them to identify features of successful AI-assisted teaching practices and support staff development. The hypothesis is that teachers are more likely to adopt AI tools if they save time, simplify lesson planning and allow teachers to teach with innovative pedagogical ideas without prior learning. AutoMate is an all-in-one platform designed to meet these needs.
AutoMate leverages a combination of Gen-AI and AI agents that can be used to perform data analysis, suggest AI-assisted innovative teaching ideas and generate resources tailored to school objectives.
The demand of AutoMate can be validated by an indication of initial interest from schools in Hong Kong, particularly schools or school teams that have indicated a plan to explore or improve AI-assisted education for pedagogical development.
The platform's core functionalities include one-step analysis and suggestion of lesson-by-lesson ideas, automatic resource generation, data collection and data-driven insights for school management and staff development. AutoMate ensures a positive user experience through intuitive design, allowing teachers to easily navigate and access its features without prior technical training. Performance metrics such as user engagement rates, user rating of generated resources, and school-level adoption number will be used to evaluate its effectiveness.
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AutoMate represents an innovative solution by opening access to AI-assisted pedagogical tools to all teachers. While some teachers may already be using Gen--AI for lesson planning, AutoMate eliminates barriers like the need for prompt engineering or technical knowledge, enabling all teachers to contribute to a culture of AI-facilitated pedagogical innovation. This can reveal the talents of every teacher who might be creative but lack the knowledge or time. Unlike other platforms that primarily provide text-based guidance, AutoMate automatically generates high-quality teaching materials, reducing the workload for teachers without requiring them to read a massive amount of textual information or follow a long list of steps. Last but not least, AutoMate allows the school to create an environment that encourages AI-assisted pedagogical innovations and its data-driven approach makes it possible for schools to identify and scale effective teaching practices, fostering staff professional development. By integrating features for sharing and rating resources, AutoMate creates a dynamic ecosystem where educators can continuously learn from one another, enhancing the overall teaching and learning experience at the school and its affiliated organizations.
To ensure scalability, AutoMate can be made to adopt an architecture that allows new features to be added seamlessly as user demand grows. The platform can be hosted on scalable cloud infrastructure to handle increasing workloads efficiently. Localization options such as curriculum customization will enable expansion into different levels of studies and schools with different curriculums. To foster sustainability, it can be considered that AutoMate offer a freemium pricing model which allows schools to access the system with a limited number of teacher users and innovation trials (idea generation and creation of resource materials) for free while making access to more teachers and trial numbers available through subscriptions. Long-term user engagement will be supported through user feedback loops and training programs for teachers through collaboration with partner schools and AI specialists for long-term staff development at the schools’ requests.
AutoMate bridges the digital gap by providing a user-friendly platform to all users and encourage them to explore Gen-AI facilitated pedagogical technologies with ready-made things that are likely to reduce the time needed for doing the work and reduce their stress regardless of their technological expertise. They all can access and benefit from innovative pedagogical tools. This inclusivity aligns with broader social goals of equity in education. To measure its social impact, metrics such as accessibility (e.g. the number of users, demographic coverage), user engagement, and long-term behavioral changes (e.g. evidence of improved integration of school objectives and use of collected data for staff development by the school) will be employed. Feedback mechanisms, including personal consultation with the school administrators, online short surveys and dedicated channels for bug reporting and feature suggestions, will ensure that the platform remains responsive to community needs.
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