Teaching AI to 2nd Graders

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses the author's experience of presenting AI topics to a challenging audience - 2nd grade students. It covers the goals, highlights, and key takeaways from the presentation, including the creation of an AI-powered website for the students to create their own stories.

🙋 Q&A

[01] Teaching AI to 2nd Graders

1. What were the author's three main goals when mapping out the presentation for the 2nd grade students?

• Keep the material short (9 total slides) and engaging (lots of fun pictures and animations)
• Get the kids working hands-on and in pairs by doing several exercises with their classroom Chromebooks
• Direct students interested in AI to first focus on education and computer fundamentals: reading, writing, math, critical thinking and using computers to create things (but without using AI)

2. How did the author create the content for the presentation?

• The author prompted several AI chatbots (Gemini, GPT-4, Claude Opus) to "describe AI to a 7 year old" as a starting point and then heavily modified the details
• The author used various everyday examples of AI in our lives, such as video recommendations, audio assistants, augmented reality, AI opponents in games, and self-driving cars
• The author created custom content, including images, music, and a video, to make the presentation more engaging for the students

3. What was the author's approach to the storytelling application created for the students?

• The author decided to create a website for the students to create their own stories in a safe manner, as existing options had issues with safety controls and adult content
• The website uses Google Gemini Pro for creating the story and DALL-E 3 for generating the story-related image
• The author made the open-source code available on GitHub for others to deploy

4. What was the key takeaway for the students interested in AI?

• The author directed students interested in AI to first focus on education and computer fundamentals: reading, writing, math, critical thinking and using computers to create things (but without using AI)
• This, along with getting the kids excited about technology in general, was the most important takeaway

[02] Presentation Highlights

1. What were some of the highlights from the presentation?

• The author used an image from the movie "Short Circuit" to depict the concept of a computer consuming large amounts of data to learn
• The author highlighted various everyday examples of AI, such as video recommendations, audio assistants, augmented reality, AI opponents in games, and self-driving cars
• The author created custom content, including images, music, and a video, to make the presentation more engaging for the students
• The author used the Teachable Machine tool, which allowed the students to work in pairs to take pictures and train the model
• The author created a website for the students to create their own stories in a safe manner, using Google Gemini Pro for story generation and DALL-E 3 for image generation