How Much AI Is Appropriate for Elementary Students?

While there is broad consensus among education and technology experts that students will need to be AI literate by the time they enter the workforce, when and how, exactly, students should be introduced to this tech is less prescribed. That leaves teachers with the difficult task today of determining when it is age-appropriate to introduce students to artificially intelligent technologies, and they’re largely doing it without a road map.

There is no avoiding AI; whether they are aware of it or not, students are already interacting with AI in their daily lives when they scroll on TikTok, ask a smart speaker a question, or use an adaptive-testing program in class. And they were using this tech before ChatGPT burst onto the scene at the end of 2022 and raised the specter for educators that students may never have to do their own homework ever again. All this makes it essential that students learn about AI in school, experts say. But when, and how, exactly? What is appropriate for early elementary students?

Kindergartners through 2nd graders are at a point in their brain development where they are more likely to attribute human qualities to artificially intelligent technologies like smart speakers and chatbots. They may even trust what an AI-powered device or tool is saying over the adults in their lives, like their teachers. One study of 3- to 6-year-olds found that some young children believe that the smart speakers in their house have their own thoughts and feelings.

“When they drew pictures of the smart speaker, some kids drew a picture of a face inside the smart speaker, some attributed emotions to the smart speaker,” said Tiffany Munzer, a developmental behavioral pediatrician at the University of Michigan. “They felt like it had a memory, like when it remembered the age of the child.” This is more an issue for younger elementary students, said Munzer. Although all children develop at their own pace, kids have usually grown out of this way of thinking by 3rd grade. It’s also harder for younger children to distinguish advertisements from the content they’re embedded in, making children especially susceptible to ads.

Just like teaching young children that the characters they see in their favorite TV shows are not real, adults need to reinforce that understanding with AI-powered technologies. They also need to be cognizant of kids’ exposure to ads within these platforms. That doesn’t mean that young children should be shielded from AI but rather that educators should give them a peek under the hood so they can start to unpack how these technologies work.

Monica Rodriguez uses a program from Google called Quick, Draw! to introduce her kindergartners to how systems that use AI technology work. Quick, Draw! is basically a game that uses a large data set of doodles made by users to try to guess what a person is drawing in 20 seconds or less. Rodriguez’s students, who attend Burleson Elementary in Odessa, Texas, use the program on her Promethean board so the entire class can watch it work. Quick, Draw! also allows users to see the doodle data their game is training on—say, the 139,000-plus pictures of apples people have drawn. The game is an example of a way that the AI behind everything from ChatGPT to streaming services’ shows how the technology learns.

Rodriguez feels her kindergartners are not only capable of learning about AI, it’s also important they do. Some of her students already have their own TikTok and YouTube accounts they post to using their parents’ devices, she said. “And I’m like, ‘What in the world? You know how to do this, but you can’t write the letter A?’ Technology is such a part of these kids’ lives,” she said. “Just because they’re little, they have been exposed to AI since they were born. Just now, we’re putting a name to it.”

As a supplement to learning, AI technologies can be a powerful tool, said Tovah Klein, a child-development psychologist and an associate professor at Barnard College. But technology should never totally supplant hands-on learning. Elementary students in particular learn through their senses, and hands-on learning is critical to their ability to fully grasp concepts.

Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services