Last year I wrote Teaching AI to 2nd Graders, where I shared my experience visiting my daughter’s elementary school. This week I went back to teach her 3rd grade class along with my younger daughter’s Kindergarten class.
You can access the full presentation here: 2025 Elementary School AI Presentation.
I used a lot of the same introductory material as last year while the actual exercises and examples were completely different. In fact, the technology is advancing so quickly that all of the examples were created by services that did not fully exist even a few weeks prior.
I changed focus in a few areas:
We covered several examples of using AI as a collaborative tool, rather than simply a way to generate finished output
A focus on AI as an educational tool, where we had the models generate questions to quiz our knowledge, while showing some potential issues of this approach
We talked about the risk of blindly trusting AI and relying on AI to do all of the work for you
I feel like this last point is the most important. I touched upon this briefly last year, but there was a more urgent need to focus on it this year. Like the population at large, younger children have started to adopt AI as part of their lives. Several students mentioned ChatGPT by name (sorry Gemini) and one mentioned using it to help with their homework. There is a big risk that we are becoming too reliant on AI, so understanding how the technology works and its built in limitations is an important subject for all ages.