Teaching my eleven year old’s class about AI

(This was re-posted from a blog post I recently wrote on Orbital Witness's Tech Blog)

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What happens when you’re asked to teach 30 eleven year olds about AI? I did just that at my son’s school last month. Here’s what I learnt.

Background

My son came home a few months ago and said “Daddy, you need to come to my class at school very, very soon and teach us everything about AI.”

That’s clearly no small feat trying to unpack the complexity of artificial intelligence (AI) for an audience of eleven year olds but I was up for the challenge. I wanted to strike the right balance between being informative about what powers AI and how it works but also show them the creative ways AI is being applied in the world right now (because that’s the really fun stuff). I set out to create a visual presentation that would achieve that along with providing ample time for the myriad of questions they would inevitably pop up throughout the lesson.

Presentation

Here’s the 37 slide deck that I used for around 30 children. I was allotted an hour but due to all the questions, from both students and teachers, we ended up spending an hour and half in total getting into some of the nitty gritty of AI:

Some observations

From the ethics around AI, to what it means for the future of work and creativity, here’s some of the themes that came out of our time together:

1. The kids I taught had a real thirst for a deeper understanding of AI. They really wanted to know how it worked, what it could help them accomplish, what the risks and ethical considerations were with using it. They even wanted to know why exactly AI doesn’t always say naughty things they sometimes ask it to say.
2. I was pleasantly surprised how philosophical some kids were evidenced by questions such as “given that you’ve been coding for years and you’re now coding AI, did you ever think that maybe someone is actually coding you…?”
3. There was a bit of an undercurrent of what they do career-wise if AI is going to end up being able to do anything. If they’re interested in music making or art or coding and AI ends up being good at those, is it worth still pursuing those interests…?

Overall it was a fascinating lesson not only for them to learn about AI but also for me to see how they perceive the latest developments in this technology. This tidal wave of innovation is underway and it’s already impacting a future generation of creators and builders who will enter the workforce in a decade from now. And – if you end up using this deck to educate your own children, let me know. I’d love to hear what you learn from the experience.