Designing a “Personal Artifact Museum” with ChatGPT

One of the most rewarding parts of teaching is designing activities that help students make meaningful connections between the past and their own lives. Recently, I ran a project with my high school students called “My Personal Artifact Museum” — and I built it with the help of ChatGPT.

What made this process especially powerful is that I created a dedicated chat called Field Trip to Ningbo Museum. In that conversation, I worked with ChatGPT to design a series of pre-visit, during-visit, and post-visit activities. Because ChatGPT remembered the earlier stages of planning, I didn’t need to keep re-explaining my goals. Instead, I was able to build activity after activity in a coherent way, almost like collaborating with a colleague in long-term unit planning.

This is an important point for teachers exploring AI: ChatGPT can be more than just a one-off lesson idea generator. By keeping your planning in a single conversation thread, you can use its memory to co-create entire sequences of lessons that build on one another.

How ChatGPT Helped Me Design the Activity

When I first thought of the idea, it was little more than a sentence: “Students create a personal museum exhibition.” From there, I guided the process, and ChatGPT became a useful partner to bounce ideas off, refine my thinking, and save time on drafting.

1. Turning a Spark into a Full Lesson

I already knew I wanted to connect the activity back to our Ningbo Museum visit and the skills we had practiced in analyzing artifacts. With that in mind, I asked ChatGPT to suggest possible lesson structures. It offered some ideas, which I then refined — keeping the parts that aligned with my goals (warm-up, teacher demo, student task, wrap-up) and discarding others. The end result was a lesson plan that fit my teaching style but was shaped more efficiently through the back-and-forth.

2. Drafting Clear Student Instructions

My concern was that the instructions might turn into a long checklist. By working iteratively with ChatGPT, I was able to pare them down to a simple, student-friendly framework:

• Show / Describe – What is the artifact?

• Connect – How does it relate to bigger ideas (history, geography, culture, identity)?

• Reflect – Why does it matter? What does it reveal about people or the world?

The clarity of this structure came from me pushing for simplicity and ChatGPT helping me rephrase until it felt right for my students.

3. Building Assessment Tools

I had a sense of what I wanted to assess (artifact explanation, connections, reflection, presentation skills, creativity), but I asked ChatGPT to help me turn those into a rubric with descriptors. This saved me time and gave me language I could adapt. The rubric was still my design — ChatGPT just helped me polish it into a ready-to-use format.

4. Extending Beyond One Lesson

I also asked myself: What comes after the exhibition? This was easy. My three-year-old son has a weekly Show and Tell in his preschool and watching how engaged he was in sharing something small but meaningful gave me the idea that my own students could do the same — but at a deeper, more analytical level. So I adapted the concept: each student would select one artifact from their personal exhibition and prepare a Show & Tell presentation. The task wasn’t just to describe the object, but to connect it to history or geography and reflect on its broader meaning. ChatGPT helped me shape the structure of this extension, but the idea came from my son’s classroom. Inspriation for good teaching often comes from unexpected places!

5. Leveraging Memory for Coherence

Because I was working in my dedicated Field Trip to Ningbo Museum chat, ChatGPT remembered the earlier activities we had designed together (artifact analysis, primary sources, historical thinking). This meant I didn’t have to re-explain the context every time — I could keep building. The continuity was mine to shape, but the memory feature helped me maintain coherence across the whole learning sequence.

Why This Worked

The activity was successful not because ChatGPT “created it,” but because I used it as a tool to sharpen and extend my own planning. As the teacher, I knew the goals: I wanted students to think like historians, connect personal identity to artifacts, and build presentation skills. ChatGPT helped me move from rough ideas to structured lessons more quickly, but the direction and decisions were fundamentally mine.

• Historical thinking skills — I deliberately connected the activity to the work we had done before the museum trip, ensuring students weren’t just describing objects but analyzing them in context.

• Student engagement — I chose to blend personal storytelling with academic analysis, knowing that this combination keeps students invested while still meeting curriculum aims.

• Efficiency — By asking ChatGPT to draft rubrics and rephrase instructions, I saved time and could focus on tailoring the activity to my class.

• Extension — I recognized the potential in ChatGPT’s suggestion of Show & Tell and adapted it into a way to deepen the activity, reinforcing both reflection and presentation skills.

ChatGPT didn’t replace my planning — it augmented it. I set the objectives, guided the process, and made the necessary professional judgments. The result was a lesson sequence that felt authentic to my teaching while also benefiting from the efficiency and creativity that AI can bring into the classroom.

This project wasn’t just about designing one activity — it was about showing students how the everyday objects around them can tell powerful stories. Museums preserve the past through artifacts, but our own lives are full of “living artifacts” that reflect culture, values, and identity. By having students curate their own exhibition, they were able to see themselves as part of history.

This connects closely to a broader philosophy of teaching: learning should be student-centered, inquiry-driven, and connected to the real world. The Personal Artifact Museum blended academic rigor (analysis, reflection, historical/geographical thinking) with creativity and personal storytelling. The result was that students were not just completing a task — they were engaging deeply with who they are and how their stories fit into larger human narratives.

ChatGPT played a supporting role in this journey, but the heart of it was the teaching: setting clear goals, scaffolding inquiry, and creating opportunities for students to think critically about their own lives. And that’s what good teaching is all about — equipping students to see connections between themselves, their communities, and the wider world.