AI Explorers Grades 6 to 8
AI Explorers Grades 6 to 8 is a 12-week AI literacy course for middle schoolers, guided by Nova, the crew's AI companion drone. Students build Sky Sorter, a paper classifier for telescope snapshots: they encode pictures as numbers, design features, write a decision tree as a flowchart and pseudocode, train it, test it on held-back cards and measure its accuracy. Then they name the three kinds of AI bias, learn how generative AI predicts the next word, why it can be confident and wrong, how to spot synthetic media, and how to weigh privacy trade-offs. The course ends with an AI review board that judges Sky Sorter against the qualities of trustworthy AI. Short daily lessons with checked answers, an unplugged Explorer Lab each week and a Saturday Explorer Quest for the family. No student ever uses a real AI tool in the course. 100% free, start to finish.
- Define an AI system as a machine-based system that makes predictions, recommendations or decisions
- Encode pictures and observations as numbers and features
- Write a model as a flowchart and pseudocode, then train, test and refine it
- Name the three kinds of AI bias and find one in a dataset
- Explain how generative AI predicts and why it can be confident and wrong
- Spot synthetic media, weigh privacy trade-offs and judge whether an AI is trustworthy
What's inside
- Week 1 What Counts as AI?
- Week 2 Sensors and Perception
- Week 3 Encoding the World
- Week 4 Representation and Reasoning
- Week 5 Rules or Learning?
- Week 6 Train, Test, Refine
- Week 7 Three Kinds of Bias
- Week 8 How Generative AI Makes Things
- Week 9 Confident and Wrong
- Week 10 Real or Synthetic?
- Week 11 Privacy and Trade-offs
- Week 12 The AI Review Board