Grades 6 to 8 Self-paced
online course
online course
AI Explorers
AI Explorers Grades 6 to 8
Free online AI literacy course · 12 weeks
- Grade
- Grades 6 to 8
- Ages
- Ages 11 to 14
- Price
- Free
- Format
- Self-paced online course at learn.lanternlearn.com
About this course
AI Explorers Grades 6 to 8 is a free 12-week AI literacy course for middle schoolers, guided by Nova. Students build Sky Sorter, a paper classifier for telescope snapshots: they encode pictures as numbers, design features, write a decision tree as a flowchart and pseudocode, train it, test it on held-back cards and refine it. Then they name three kinds of AI bias, learn how generative AI predicts the next word and why it can be confident and wrong, spot synthetic media, weigh privacy trade-offs, and run an AI review board.
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 Counts as AI? | Objectives, outputs and autonomy | 2-IC-20 |
| 2 | Sensors and Perception | From raw signals to meaning | 2-CS-02 |
| 3 | Encoding the World | Pixels, color values and feature tables | 2-DA-07 |
| 4 | Representation and Reasoning | From feature tables to decision trees | 2-AP-10 |
| 5 | Rules or Learning? | Hand-written rules versus patterns found in data | 2-AP-10 |
| 6 | Train, Test, Refine | Measuring how well Sky Sorter really works | 2-DA-09 |
| 7 | Three Kinds of Bias | When a fair-looking score hides a gap | 2-IC-21 |
| 8 | How Generative AI Makes Things | From sorting to making | 2-IC-20 |
| 9 | Confident and Wrong | Why smooth answers still need checking | 2-IC-20 |
| 10 | Real or Synthetic? | Slow down before you share | 2-IC-20 |
| 11 | Privacy and Trade-offs | What to share, what to protect | 2-IC-23 |
| 12 | The AI Review Board | Review, refine and present | 2-IC-21 |