For the past month and a half, NewTechKids has been slowly introducing AI literacy to students in groups 1-8 at IKC Metropool, a new primary school in Amsterdam southeast that is integrating tech education into its core curriculum. This is based on our belief that schools have to start teaching kids about AI as soon as they start school to equip them with the knowledge and skills needed to navigate the AI in their lives responsibly.
Kids are already bombarded with AI-generated content (images, video, music), AI chatbots like ChatGPT, AI features in games, TikTok’s endless scrolling feature, YouTube recommendations, and more. Our lessons aim to help them understand:
- what makes people different than AI: unlike AI, we have emotions, feelings and lived experiences that influence how we think and learn and shape the world we live in
- why we need to adopt values and ethics which guide how we use AI and how we as a society create rules which guide AI creation and usage
- what AI is and how it works: AI uses pattern recognition and matches images and words
- the importance of thinking critically about the multimedia content they consume: Can we trust what we see, hear, create with? Who made it? Why? Is it real or fake? What impact does it have on our thinking and behavior?
- how AI is not human: computer programs are designed and controlled by humans based on knowledge that humans have built up over centuries
For the youngest students, we use robots as a more understandable concept to explain AI. For the rest of students, we actively use the term AI, being careful to always explain it in the context of computer programs without giving it human qualities. For the oldest students, we are diving into how AI works (pattern recognition) as well as the ethics related to creating and using AI.
(Students ages 4-6 having fun with an obviously AI-generated video.)
NewTechKids believes that all students, teachers and parents should learn basic AI literacy before allowing kids to have access to AI tools, integrating AI tools into school curriculum, and adopting AI tools for administrative assistance or learning monitoring.