The AI Literacy — a structured course · grades 3–8 · ages 8–14
A course in six plates.
What AI is, how it works, where it is wrong, and how to use it honestly. Six plates, one lesson each, taught by Archie — in order, because plate 3 does not work before plate 2.
All six lesson plans are readable below, without signing in
The plates
Plate 01
What it is actually doing
Outcome · 35 min
Can explain prediction from context without using the word “thinking”.
Lesson plan — readable below
Plate 02
Where it gets things wrong
Outcome · 40 min
Can produce an example of a confident wrong answer, and give an account of why it happened.
Lesson plan — readable below
Plate 03
Checking a claim
Outcome · 45 min
Can find a source for a statement, or say clearly that they could not find one.
Lesson plan — readable below
Plate 04
Whose words are these
Outcome · 40 min
Can distinguish, in their own piece of work, what they did from what a tool did.
Lesson plan — readable below
Plate 05
What it knows about you
Outcome · 35 min
Can name three things a service might collect and give one reason it would want each.
Lesson plan — readable below
Plate 06
Using it honestly
Outcome · 45 min
Writes down how they used a tool on a piece of work, without being asked to.
Lesson plan — readable below
Six plates · module names and outcomes verbatim from the course — nothing here is invented
Start the courseNeeds a child’s card or class · grades 3–8
What you need to teach it
A room with some devices in it and forty minutes. No prior knowledge — every plate assumes the teacher is learning this alongside the class, because most are.
Each plate has a starter, a main task, a plenary, teacher notes and an assessment paragraph. The pupil work is writing and talking; there is no worksheet to print and nothing to mark that a machine could mark.
The course does not require children to have accounts with any AI service. Where a plan uses a model directly, it uses one device at the front of the room with the class watching — and plate 05 uses none at all, on purpose.
Each lesson also has a booklet to read together, Read It Together, in two voices: a read-aloud for grades 3–5 and a plain one for 6–8. It is on every lesson page, as a deck to project or print, and in the app, where Archie reads it aloud. A parent at the kitchen table and a teacher at the front learn it the same way the child does.
The syllabus is the course: the six plates above are six lessons a child can take with Archie today, each a reading and four questions, the last of which is a machine’s answer with a mistake in it to find — written six times over, once for each grade. The six lesson plans below are the teacher’s half, published here in full so a teacher can read every plan before a pilot rather than take it on trust.
Taught in class, with Archie alongside.
The course is classroom material, run by a teacher. Children take it with Archie, one plate at a time, and keep what they make.