Control Alt Achieve: Free Resources to Teach Your Students about AI

As artificial intelligence has become more popular in schools, we have seen lots of great support materials for educators. I have provided many hours of PD, as well as videos, blog posts, resources docs, and more.

You can access all of my AI resources at www.controlaltachieve.com/ai

In addition to training educators, we also need to make sure our students are being well educated on AI. This can involve lessons and activities on:

What AI is and what tools are available
How they can use AI to assist them
What are appropriate and inappropriate uses of AI
Identifying potential misinformation and bias in AI
And more

Thankfully we are not on our own in providing this information to our students. Many organizations have created lessons, activities, videos, and more to cover these topics in engaging ways for our learners. And best of all, the content is free!

See below for a collection of free resources to help educate students about AI. Although this is an excellent list, I am sure there are many other resources that could be added. Please share any resources you know of ( to me at ericcurts@gmail.com ) and I will be happy to update this post to include them.

📋 The List

Below is a quick list of the collected resources and their links. Scroll down further in the blog post to read details on each of these resources.

Discover AI in Daily Life - Resource link
AI Literacy Lessons - Resource link
How AI Works - Resource link
Day of AI - Resource link
Teach AI from aiEDU - Resource link
Classroom-Ready Resources About AI For Teaching (CRAFT) - Resource link
DAILy Middle School AI Curriculum - Resource link
Ethics of AI Curriculum - Resource link
Teachable Machine - Resource link
Say What You See - Resource link
Odd One Out - Resource link

🧭 Discover AI in Daily Life

Resource link

This lesson is part of Google's Applied Digital Skills collection of technology lessons, and is composed of ready-to-use instructional videos that help students "Learn artificial intelligence concepts using Quick, Draw!, AutoDraw, Google Translate, and Google Slides."

The videos are short, ranging from 3 to 6 minutes in length. Google estimates that the entire lesson can be completed in 45 to 90 minutes. The lesson is designed for students in late elementary through high school.

This lesson addresses the following objectives:

Provide a basic explanation of how artificial intelligence works.
Discuss some benefits and challenges of using artificial intelligence.
Identify a few well-known tools that use artificial intelligence.
Provide examples of how artificial intelligence is used around the world on a typical day.

📖 AI Literacy Lessons

Resource link

This is a collection of 8 short lessons from Common Sense Media to help your students think critically about AI and its impact. Through these lessons, students will:

Understand what AI is and how it works
Consider some of its potential benefits and risks
Think critically about how we can be responsible and ethical users of AI

Each lesson is 15 to 20 minutes in length, and several of the lessons include videos. The lessons are designed for students in grades 6 through 12.

The topics covered include:

What Is AI?
How Is AI Trained?
AI Chatbots: Who's Behind the Screen?
AI Chatbots & Friendship
Understanding AI Bias
How AI Bias Impacts Our Lives
AI Algorithms: How Well Do They Know You?
Facing Off with Facial Recognition

❓ How AI Works

Resource link

This is a series of short videos and accompanying in-classroom lessons from Code.org. The lessons will introduce you and your students to how artificial intelligence works and why it matters. You can choose individual lessons based on topic, explore the whole series of topics in one class or teach all 7 lessons to give a deeper dive.

The lessons are aimed at grades 6 through 12. The videos are short, ranging from 3 to 7 minutes in length, but each entire lesson can last about 45 minutes.

These lessons will:

Introduce you to artificial intelligence and machine learning
Dive into how generative AI works, including large language models (LLMs) and image generation
Explore bias, ethics, privacy and the responsible use of AI
Touch on real world applications of AI, including computer vision

The lessons include:

Introduction to Machine Learning
Computer Vision
Neural Networks
Chatbots and Large Language Models
Generative Images
Algorithmic Bias
Our AI Code of Ethics

☀️ Day of AI

Resource link

Day of AI offers free hands-on curriculum and activities for elementary, middle school, and high school students, all about AI and how it shapes their lives. The content was developed by MIT RAISE and has lessons for all grade levels.

Note: You will need to register for free to have access to the curriculum.

The current curriculum covers ages 5 through 18 and includes:

ChatGPT in School
What is AI?
What Can AI Do?
Teachable Machines
AI Blueprint Bill of Rights
Can Machines Be Creative?
Game AI
AI in Social Media
Data Science and Me
Intro to Voice AI
Personal Image Classifier
Data Science and Decision Making

🎓 Teach AI from aiEDU

Resource link

The AI Education Project has created a wide range of free lessons and activities to teach students in grade 7 through 12 about AI. These include:

Introduction to AI

A 10-week project-based learning course that introduces the fundamentals of AI through engaging, culturally relevant lessons.
35 lessons at 45 minutes each
Grades 9-12
Teacher-led

AI Snapshots

180 Classroom warmups built to spark debate, ignite curiosity, and build community.
180 warmups at 5 minutes each
Grade 7-12
Teacher-led

Project Dashboard

A variety of unique, engaging projects for high school students.
Choose what’s right for your classroom from a mix of independent and teacher-led projects in a variety of subjects.

Note: You will need to fill out a form to access and download the curriculum, but everything is free.

✂️ Classroom-Ready Resources About AI For Teaching (CRAFT)

Resource link

CRAFT is a collaboration with the Graduate School of Education and Institute for Human-Centered AI. CRAFT is a collection of co-designed free AI Literacy resources about AI for high school teachers, to help students explore, understand, question, and critique AI.

Lessons include:

How can AI help us become better writers?
How does algorithmic bias impact different AI applications?
Is AI new?
What is algorithmic bias?
How does AI classify images?
How should (or shouldn’t) my data be used in AI Algorithms?
Where in the world is AI around me?

📆 DAILy Middle School AI Curriculum

Resource link

DAILy is a middle school AI curriculum focusing on on AI concepts, ethical issues in AI, creative expression using AI, and how AI relates to your future.

Designed by MIT educators and experienced facilitators, this curriculum features hands-on and computer-based activities on AI concepts, ethical issues in AI, creative expression using AI, and how AI relates to the future. Topics include training and using machine learning to make predictions, investigating bias in machine learning applications, using generative adversarial networks to create novel works of art, and learning to recognize the AI we interact with daily and in the world around us.

⚖️ Ethics of AI Curriculum

Resource link

This document from MIT Media Lab includes a set of activities, teacher guides, assessments, materials, and more to assist educators in teaching about the ethics of artificial intelligence. These activities were developed at the MIT Media Lab to meet a growing need for children to understand artificial intelligence, its impact on society, and how they might shape the future of AI.

The activities are geared toward students in grades 5 through 8.

The learning objectives for the activities include:

Understand the basic mechanics of artificial intelligence systems.
Understand that all technical systems are socio-technical systems. Understand that socio-technical systems are not neutral sources of information and serve political agendas.
Recognize there are many stakeholders in a given socio-technical system and that the system can affect these stakeholders differentially.
Apply both technical understanding of AI and knowledge of stakeholders in order to determine a just goal for a socio-technical system.
Consider the impact of technology on the world.

⚙️ Teachable Machine

Resource link

Teachable Machine is an interactive tool from Google that lets you create your own machine learning model. You can train the computer to recognize your images, sounds, and poses without writing any machine learning code. This is a great way to help students understand the basics behind how artificial intelligence is trained.

The site includes a simple version and a newer advanced version.

If you just want to quickly demo how machine learning works and don’t need to save anything, use the simple version from 2017 at teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/v1
If you want to save your model and create a working project, use the latest more advanced version at teachablemachine.withgoogle.com

👀 Say What You See

Resource link

This is an interactive game from Google where you practice creating a prompt to generate a specific image. This can be a great way for students to learn about and improve their AI prompting skills.

Here's the basics:

First the game gives you a sample AI-generated image.
Next you write your own prompt to try to recreate that image as close as possible.
The AI will then make a new image from your prompt and compare the two.
You have three attempts per image to pass a visual similarity threshold.

🖼️ Odd One Out

Resource link

This is an interactive game from Google where you try to see if you can spot which image is generated by AI from a collection of pictures. This can be a great way to introduce AI images and discuss the challenge and importance of being able to distinguish what is real and what is generated.

Here are the basics:

Each round you will be presented with one AI-generated image and three images from Google Art & Culture.
You then click on the image you think is AI generated.
You have to be able to identify the AI image to move on.
If you make four mistakes the game is over.