A Structured Unplugged Approach for Foundational AI Literacy in Primary Education

TL;DR

This paper introduces a structured, mathematically grounded teaching approach to improve foundational AI literacy among primary school students, emphasizing understanding over tool usage.

Contribution

It presents a novel, replicable curriculum that integrates core mathematical concepts to enhance AI understanding in young learners, supported by empirical evaluation.

Findings

Students showed improved AI terminology understanding.

Enhanced reasoning and evaluative skills observed.

Students found the activities engaging and relevant.

Abstract

Younger generations are growing up in a world increasingly shaped by intelligent technologies, making early AI literacy crucial for developing the skills to critically understand and navigate them. However, education in this field often emphasizes tool-based learning, prioritizing usage over understanding the underlying concepts. This lack of knowledge leaves non-experts, especially children, prone to misconceptions, unrealistic expectations, and difficulties in recognizing biases and stereotypes. In this paper, we propose a structured and replicable teaching approach that fosters foundational AI literacy in primary students, by building upon core mathematical elements closely connected to and of interest in primary curricula, to strengthen conceptualization, data representation, classification reasoning, and evaluation of AI. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted an empirical study with thirty-one fifth-grade students across two classes, evaluating their progress through a post-test and a satisfaction survey. Our results indicate improvements in terminology understanding and usage, features description, logical reasoning, and evaluative skills, with students showing a deeper comprehension of decision-making processes and their limitations. Moreover, the approach proved engaging, with students particularly enjoying activities that linked AI concepts to real-world reasoning. Materials: https://github.com/tail-unica/ai-literacy-primary-ed.