Grades 9 to 12 Self-paced
online course
online course
AI Explorers
AI and You Grades 9 to 12
Free online AI literacy elective · 12 weeks
- Grade
- Grades 9 to 12
- Ages
- Ages 14 to 18
- Price
- Free
- Format
- Self-paced online course at learn.lanternlearn.com
About this course
AI and You Grades 9 to 12 is a free 12-week AI literacy elective for high schoolers. Comet, Wren and Nova join a school panel reviewing SH-1, a made-up AI study helper. Students run a tiny next-word model by hand, measure a model on a test set, find bias and confident errors, map privacy and security risks such as prompt injection and data poisoning, weigh synthetic media and environmental cost, and decide where humans stay in charge. Each Friday meets the people who build, test and govern AI.
12-week list
Each week has short lessons Monday to Friday, with an unplugged Explorer Lab on Wednesday and a family Explorer Quest on Saturday.
| Week | Topic | Focus | CSTA |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | What Is SH-1, Really? | What kind of system is an AI study helper? | 3B-AP-08 |
| 2 | The Lifecycle and Its People | Who builds, runs and checks an AI system | 3B-AP-08 |
| 3 | How Models Learn | From training data to predictions | 3A-DA-12 |
| 4 | How Generative Models Write | Next-word prediction and confident errors | 3B-DA-07 |
| 5 | Measuring a Model | Test sets, accuracy and errors | 3B-DA-05 |
| 6 | Bias, Fairness and Sameness | Does it serve every student equally well? | 3A-IC-25 |
| 7 | Privacy in the Machine | What a question log can reveal | 3A-IC-29 |
| 8 | Safety and Security | Prompt injection, data poisoning and defenses | 3B-IC-25 |
| 9 | Real, Fake and Whose? | Synthetic media, provenance and ownership | 3A-IC-28 |
| 10 | Footprint and Supply Chain | Environmental cost, the value chain and access | 3B-IC-26 |
| 11 | Humans in Charge | Oversight, over-trust and the final say | 3B-IC-25 |
| 12 | People of AI and the Final Review | AI roles and a go-with-conditions call | 3B-AP-08 |