Teaching kids about AI - age appropriate resources?
I want my kids (8 and 12) to understand what AI is, how it works at a basic level, and how to use it responsibly. Not trying to make them programmers but I think AI literacy is going to be as important as reading and math.
Anyone found good resources for teaching kids about AI? Books, courses, projects?
For the 8 year old - "How to Train Your Robot" is a great intro book. Also Google has a free "AI for Kids" series on YouTube that explains concepts with animations.
For the 12 year old - let them actually USE the tools with supervision. My 12 year old learned more about AI in a week of playing with ChatGPT than any book could teach. We talked about how it works, what its limitations are, why it sometimes gets things wrong.
Scratch (the coding platform from MIT) has some AI/ML extensions that let kids build simple AI projects. My daughter made a program that recognizes hand-drawn shapes and she was SO excited when it worked. Hands-on learning beats lectures every time at that age.
Also check out Machine Learning for Kids (machinelearningforkids.co.uk) - its free and designed for classroom use but works great at home.
The most important thing IMO is teaching them that AI isn't magic and isn't always right. My go-to exercise: ask ChatGPT a question about something your kid is an expert on (Pokemon, Minecraft, whatever) and let them catch the mistakes. Great way to build healthy skepticism about AI outputs.