Adam Sroka

Data & AI Director

I build data and AI platforms for the energy sector | Director at Hypercube Consulting

Dr Adam Sroka is a Co-founder and CEO at Hypercube Consulting, a firm that helps organisations unlock value from data by delivering enterprise-scale solutions and building high-performing data and analytics teams from the ground up. With over 10 years of experience in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, Adam is a recognised expert and speaker in his field.

Adam's mission is to bridge the gap between technology and business, and to enable data-driven innovation and transformation across various industries. He shares his insights and best practices through his blog, podcast, and tech community events, where he showcases his approaches and systems for effective communication, engineering discipline, and experimentation. Adam is passionate about helping organisations and data professionals maximise their potential and impact with data and AI.

Director

I turn complicated processes into AI workflows you can actually use for my website 'The AI Blueprint Store'- TheAIBlueprintStore.com.

I work with entrepreneurs, school leaders, content creators, and marketers who want better results from AI.

I've spent 3+ years in Claude Projects, Claude Skills, and NotebookLM - testing stuff, breaking it, rebuilding it.

Everything I share is stuff I've actually used and developed.

No AI slop.

I've advised the Stanford GenAI Accelerator Project and TeachAI. Contributing to a new Harvard emerging technologies course.

Guest spoken with ISTE, ASCD, and with teachers, universities and school networks I've lost count of.

Now, I build AI blueprints / workflows.

And, I create courses.

I'm the CEO and Co-Founder of PBL Future Labs with Thom Markham, a better system to learn with AI.

Based in Acapulco, Mexico.

Got a education, content, or marketing process eating your time?

I probably have a workflow for it.

Phillip Alcock

Here is a simple test for any course you teach.

When the semester ends, will the student's final product go in the trash?

If the answer is yes, you've designed compliance.

If it survives, if someone outside the classroom would read it, use it, or build on it, you've designed learning.

Most university courses fail this test.

The architecture is built around content delivery and isolated exams.

The stakes are artificial.
The audience is one person with a red pen.

The Learning Mission replaces that architecture.

The challenge becomes the unit.
The driving question can't be Googled.
The audience is real, a county health department, a community board, a panel of working professionals.

Content doesn't disappear.
It gets repositioned.

Students encounter knowledge at the exact moment they need it to solve a problem that matters.

That's when retention happens.
That's when transfer happens.
That's when a student stops performing and starts thinking.

The content stays the same.

The architecture changes everything.

If you're teaching in higher ed and wondering where to start, start with one unit.

Redesign it around a question no one can answer in a search bar.

Find one outside partner.

Make the final product public.

Then watch what happens when students realise someone is actually paying attention.

PBL Future Labs Thom Markham, Ph.D.

AI Workflows | CEO / Co-Founder PBL Future Labs | Top 50 Rising Substack Author | PhillipAlcock.substack.com & AIForBeginners.substack.com

The_Learning_Mission

NotebookLM × Game-Based Learning Part 2 Branching Stories

Here's another great strategy!

I am also writing a training series on Google NotebookLM escape rooms coming soon to Youtube!

Consider an approach to treat NotebookLM as a 'game-based engine' instead.

I uploaded a division curriculum document standard details, learning goals, the worked examples, the reasoning behind why we teach Area Models and Partial Quotients together.

Then in the NotebookLM chat, I asked:
"Create a maths branching story based on this standard. Students are Space Academy cadets. The navigation computer is down. They must use manual division calculations to land the ship."

What came back was a three-node simulation.

Each node locked students into a different calculation scenario splitting thrust units across retro-rockets, packing rovers into landing crates, distributing heat shield capacity across thermal panels.

Wrong path?

The ship bounces off the atmosphere.

Right path?
Touchdown confirmed.

The branching isn't random. It is like sequencing learning and built directly from the standard's own reasoning estimation first, then Area Model or Partial Quotients, then inverse operations to verify.

The game is the standard.

If you're building maths units and want to try this, upload your standard with your reasoning attached. Maybe it's from Booker, maybe it's a theory you watched online. Add the backbone.

Then ask for a branching story, not a worksheet.

The output will surprise you.

PBL Future Labs Thom Markham, Ph.D. Thomas Blakemore Vera Cubero Ashlee Russell, M.Ed. Tom Millinchip Marcia Powell

Space_Academy_Division_Logbook

What if all students put down their phones and built treehouses?

Kids aged 8 to 18 are spending 7.5 hours a day on screens just for fun.

That's 114 full days a year.

Not schoolwork.
Not video calls.

Just screens.

And somewhere in all of that, we lost the one thing that actually builds brains: making stuff with your hands.

The average human attention span in 2000 was 12 seconds.

By 2024 it had dropped to 8.25 seconds. A goldfish holds focus for 9.

The fish is winning.

A JAMA study of 48,775 children found that kids with 2 or more hours of daily screen time had measurably lower psychological wellbeing scores. 

Excessive screen time is also linked to thinning of the brain's cortex the region responsible for thinking.

And the fix isn't another app.

It's a treehouse.

Outdoor, hands-on learning puts the brain into what researchers call a "relaxed yet alert" state.

A 2025 ScienceDirect review of 26 studies confirmed that nature exposure lowers stress and enhances attention in ways no screen can replicate.

A 562-student Norwegian study found outdoor time directly links to stronger working memory in kids.

Building a cardboard prototype teaches more about structural engineering, spatial reasoning, and failure tolerance than a semester of worksheets. 

Kids are clocking 21 hours of screen time per week.

Parents say the ideal is 9.

The gap between those two numbers is exactly the size of a treehouse.

PBL Future Labs Thom Markham, Ph.D.

Screens Down Brains Up

A kid once told me worksheets felt like “doing taxes for school.”

He wasn’t wrong.

A page of questions with lines for answers is a contract with no story in it. 

Complete this.
Move on.

No one is waiting for your answer.
Nothing depends on it.

The fix isn’t necessarily know the ins and outs of project-based learning or game-based education.

Not points, not badges, not a leaderboard.

The fix is giving the work a world a narrative container created by YOU that makes the student the protagonist, not the respondent.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

Free article below.

PBL Future Labs Thom Markham, Ph.D. Marcia Powell

Borders in Google NotebookLM are what it's all about!

Check out the workflow in my aiforbeginners substack!

*Trigger warning - sad stats

White Tiger Field Journal

Most PBL units die in Week 2.

Not because teachers aren't trying.

Because the plan said "students will develop AI fluency" and nobody asked what that actually means on a Tuesday afternoon when a Year 9 student submits a wall of ChatGPT text and the teacher writes "needs more critical thinking" in the feedback box.

The student had no idea what that meant.
The teacher had no idea what that meant either.

But the unit looked great in the planning document.

The anchor project was ambitious.

The learning goals used the right words.

Collaboration. Inquiry. AI Fluency. Beautifully vague. Totally unmeasurable. Spiritually correct.

Week 1 was inspiring. Week 3 was a group of four students two of whom did everything submitting a Canva poster with a gradient.

The fix isn't more enthusiasm.

It's a skill translation matrix, three structured isolation activities before the project starts, a shared vocabulary card built from student language, a daily three-minute reflection tied to a specific AI framework, and a 60/40 rubric that separates what students learned from what they produced.

I wrote the whole system up.

The free version gives you the five-step framework and a starter prompt.

The paid version has the exact isolation activity prompts, the vocabulary card template, the reflection protocol, and the rubric.

Paid subscribers can request workflows, I have already made 3.

Link in the comments.

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The Battle

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Phillip Alcock

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Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Phillip Alcock's LinkedIn Performance

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