Home Teaching AI
Free · Classes 4–12 · Nothing to install

Teaching AI to school students,
starting with how it actually works

Most AI lessons teach children what AI can do. This one teaches them how it works and why it goes wrong — because a student who understands next-word prediction can spot a confident wrong answer, and a student who has only seen a demo cannot.

55 minutes across 3 levelsClasses 4–12Free, no accountRuns in a browser
Open the course No sign-up, no installation. Share the link with a class and it works.

The problem with most AI lessons

Children already use AI. What they do not have is any model of what is happening when they do — so when it produces a fluent, confident, completely invented answer, nothing in their head objects.

Teaching a list of AI tools does not fix that, and it dates within a term. Teaching the mechanism does fix it, and the mechanism has not changed in years.

So this course spends its whole first level on one idea: it predicts what comes next. Everything else — hallucination, why it cannot add up, why it forgets, why it sounds sure — falls out of that single fact.

Three levels, three sittings

Level 1 · How AI actually works

Eleven short activities, about 15 minutes. Students nest the four words everyone confuses, build a sentence one predicted word at a time, watch a model invent an entire novel, and drop a page off a full desk to see an answer quietly go wrong. Nothing is marked.

Level 2 · Asking it properly

About 20 minutes. Students write a real prompt, a real AI answers it, and they must decide whether the answer is any good before the app tells them. Then they learn five plain-English questions that fix almost any prompt, and rewrite until they beat their own score.

Level 3 · Building a workflow

About 20 minutes. Students build a production line of six stations and decide which a machine should do, which needs code, and which needs a person. Then they run twenty items through it and see what got past them.

What a student can do afterwards

✅ Explain in one sentence what an AI model is actually doing
✅ Tell the difference between AI, machine learning, generative AI and an LLM
✅ Recognise a hallucination, and know why it sounds so convincing
✅ Give an AI the right context instead of expecting it to know things
✅ Write a prompt that says who, what, with what, in what shape, and what to do when it does not know
✅ Say which tasks should never be handed to a machine, and why
Nothing here is a quiz. The teaching half of Level 1 cannot be failed and is not scored — students do something with their hands and are then told what just happened to them. Marks only appear at the end, when they apply the idea to a situation they have not seen.

How a class actually runs it

1
Share one link. No accounts, no codes, no installation. It runs in any browser, including on a phone.
2
Students work alone or in pairs. Pairs work well — the arguments about whether an answer is right are the best part.
3
Stop at the end of a level. Each level is self-contained and ends with something a student can explain out loud.
4
Discuss the failures, not the successes. The moments where the AI is confidently wrong are where the learning is.

Where it fits in the timetable

Computer science / IT

The most natural home. Level 1 covers what a model is, what training means, and why generative AI is not a database.

Digital literacy or life skills

The privacy and accountability material — does it learn from you, who is responsible when it is wrong — sits here comfortably.

Any subject, as a one-off

Teachers of English, history and science have used the hallucination activity as a 20-minute lesson on why you check a source.

Questions schools ask us

Do students need accounts?No. There is no sign-up and no login. Share the link and it works.
Is it really free?Yes, the course is free to use. We offer paid facilitated sessions and teacher training for schools that want them, but nothing in the course is gated.
Does it need anything installed?No. It runs in a browser on a laptop, a tablet or a phone.
Is student data collected?We record anonymous usage — which activities were completed — so we can improve the course. Students are never asked for a name, an email or any personal detail.
Does it use a real AI?Level 1 does not need one; every activity is built in. Levels 2 and 3 send the student's own prompt to a real model so the answer genuinely responds to what they wrote.
What age is it for?Written for Classes 4 to 12. Nothing in it requires maths or coding, and adults get just as much out of it — we use the same material with professionals.
Can we get a class report?Not yet. A teacher can tag a device with a class code, but a full dashboard showing who finished what is something we are building next. Tell us if you need it and we will build it with you.

Try it before you decide anything

Open Level 1 and give it ten minutes. If it does not teach you something about AI you did not know, it will not teach your students either.

Open the course