Monday 3 June 2024

Enhancing your Youth retreat activity with Custom Word Search Activities: Using ChatGPT and Online Word Search Maker

Imagine a youth retreat program where students not only disconnect from their daily studies but also embark on a journey of self-reflection, relaxation, and spiritual growth. I've been invited to a number of retreat programs by DWU Chaplain, Madang campus and with every retreat I attend I tinker up activities for the students to do based on the theme at hand. Sometimes I get called up in the last minute and I have to do an activity as quickly as I can.

More recently, I was determined to create an activity that would captivate the students and ignite their enthusiasm for learning while nurturing their faith. That's when inspiration struck: why not incorporate technology into our activities, using the power of ChatGPT and an online word search maker to craft engaging and educational challenges?

At first glance, it may seem like an unconventional combination, but the results were remarkable. ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence language model, was used to extract key words and terms from long Bible passages and then these key terms were fed into an online word search make to create word search puzzles.

Here's my step by step on how to do this.

Part 1 Using ChatGPT to pickout key words from a Bible Passage

Identify the theme for the retreat and the key Bible passages.

Tell the AI model what you are planning to do and that you are going to give it a bible passage or an entire chapter and it has to extract at least 15-20 single words for the word search. You can even include in the prompt the theme.

Here is my example prompt:

Pretend that you are the youth leader for a group of 1st and 2nd year university students on a retreat event. You would like to create a word search activity for the youths to do in groups and these words will come from a bible passage. I will provide for you the passage and you give me a list of 10 key words from this bible passage and 10 key words related to the theme of "Making use of your talents".

In the example above, I copied the entire chapter of Mathew 25 on the Parable of the Ten Virgins from Bible gateway online (English Standard Version).

I then pasted the chapter into chatgpt and let it do its magic.


Part 2 Bringing the words into online word search maker