A new teaching pack is set to bring AI learning into primary schools in Scotland – with a focus on ‘practical, ethical and age-appropriate ways’ for children to learn about the technology.
The Children’s Parliament, the Scottish AI Alliance and The Alan Turing Institute have launched the ‘comprehensive’ new resource, which aims to put children and their rights at the centre of the conversation about AI.
It comes after a survey showed that teachers and school staff in Scotland currently lack confidence and support in teaching children about AI. Of the respondents, 71 per cent had no or low confidence in addressing the subject with their pupils, and 79 per cent had received no guidance on the use of AI.
Gregory Metcalfe, project lead at the Children’s Parliament, said: “The children we’ve worked with have been really clear – they know that AI has implications for their rights and they think it’s really important that children and adults learn about it.
“We also know that this is a complex subject which not all teachers feel confident explaining. We created this resource to equip teachers with the knowledge to explore this topic factually, and children with a critical framework – their children’s human rights – to think about AI not just as a technology but as something which will have real impacts, both good and bad, on their lives.”
The Children’s Rights and AI Teaching Pack includes 6 lesson plans with clear learning objectives for children in P5 to P7 including:
- Easy-to-follow and ready to use lesson plans on understanding and exploring AI in relation to children’s lived experience and their human rights
- Real-life scenarios to explore fairness, safety and privacy
- Animated explainer videos created by children for children
- Tools for critical thinking, discussion and creativity
The Children’s Parliament, The Scottish AI Alliance and The Alan Turing Institute, have been exploring with children how they interact with AI, what they think the possibilities and risks are for the use of AI in Scotland, and how they can become meaningfully involved in AI development and policy.
Taking a children human rights approach, Members of Children’s Parliament (MCPs) were asked to think about what needs to happen for AI to play a role in keeping all children healthy, happy and safe. To try to capture as broad a range of views as possible and to reflect the diversity of experiences of children in Scotland, the project engaged classes ranging from P4 to P7 in four schools in different locations across Scotland: Glasgow, Stirlingshire, Edinburgh, and Shetland.
The activities in the resource pack have been designed, tested and edited with the support of both children and teachers. The themes that the resources focus on were developed by the children who took part in the project and are a direct outcome of one of their key calls to action, that AI should be in the curriculum.
The resources are available here.