AI literacy, by age
Kids will meet AI whether we plan for it or not. We teach what it is — and what it is not — without turning Kindergarten into a tech panic or high school into a prompt-engineering club.
Life Academy is not an AI product. Students still have to show their own work on mastery Fridays. A generated paragraph is not evidence.
K–5 · A computer follows steps
- If the steps are wrong, the result is wrong. That is debugging, not magic.
- A talking toy or Voice Coach is following a program, not “thinking like a person.”
- Never share full name, address, or photos with a chatbot or unknown site. Parent is in the room.
- Pictures a computer “draws” are mash-ups, not photographs of a real day.
6–8 · Models guess from patterns
- A model is trained on examples. It predicts the next likely thing — weather, a word, a category.
- Garbage in, garbage out: biased or thin data makes biased or thin answers.
- Search vs generate: a search can show a source; a generator can invent a confident sentence. Check.
- School rule: you may use a tool to explain a concept. You may not paste its essay as yours.
9–12 · How large models work — and when to refuse them
- Training data, tokens, probability — in plain English, tied to Algebra / Statistics language.
- Hallucinations: fluent ≠ true. Cite a real source or it does not go in the lab notebook.
- Bias and harm: whose data, whose dialect, whose history got left out.
- Academic honesty on the transcript: process work (drafts, data, CER) beats a polished ghostwrite.
- When not to use it: closed-book mastery, original lab analysis, anything you would be ashamed to explain to a registrar.
Open the Thinking Coach (hints and a fake-citation lab — it will not take your quiz) · ← Computational thinking · Grade 9 Python lab