“Discover AI in Daily Life”:

An AI Literacy Lesson for Middle School Students

Allison Woodruff Annica Schjott Voneche Kelly Thunstrom

Google Google Synergis
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Reena Jana Rebecca L. Hardy Derek R. Aoki Patrick Gage Kelley

Google Google Bullis Charter School Google
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

ABSTRACT educators from across the US to ensure the lesson structure,

content, pacing and tone were a good fit for the intended audience;
We describe “Discover AI in Daily Life”, a lesson in Google’s
e.g. we increased the number of hands-on activities.
Applied Digital Skills curriculum. The lesson introduces elements
of AI literacy and is freely available online at g.co/DiscoverAI. It is
designed for middle school students while also supporting high 3 THE LESSON
school and adult learners. The lesson is comprised of 15 activities that can be followed in
sequence or done independently and in total take about 1 to 2
hours to complete. Most of the activities involve watching a video
1 INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION
and doing a short assignment such as using an AI experiment,
In recent years, the expanding integration of Artificial Intelligence
creating an artifact, or responding to questions. The lesson also
(AI) in society has been accompanied by increased calls for public
includes an extended lesson plan for educators.
understanding of its use and impact. For example, recent efforts
have called for greater emphasis on K-12 AI education, so that
students may become critical consumers of AI-powered
technologies and prepare for civic participation, as well as
potentially prepare for AI-related careers [1,2,4,5]. Efforts to
support K-12 AI education are in early stages, with experts calling
for contributions to standards, research, curriculum, and more
[3,5]. In this context, we offer a short, lightweight lesson which
can be used on its own or as part of a larger curriculum.

Figure 1: An excerpt from one of the videos, showing a

2 APPROACH farmer using an AI app to diagnose a problem with her
The lesson focuses on AI literacy [3], especially helping students plants
recognize where and how AI touches their lives and the lives of
others, and understand broad capabilities and challenges with AI.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
While many choices are possible, in our case we developed a free
We thank Kevin Lozandier, Quentin Luckie, Scott Robson, and
online resource that requires only an internet browser, is initially
Juliet Tiffany-Morales for their contributions to this work.
available in English, is designed to be highly accessible to learners
and educators from a broad range of backgrounds, and can be
meaningfully incorporated in a wide range of classes (particularly
REFERENCES
[1] AI4K12.org
non-technical ones). By design, the lesson does not focus on [2] Irene Lee, Safinah Ali, Helen Zhang, Daniella DiPaola, and Cynthia Breazeal,
programming or implementation details but rather broader 2021. Developing Middle School Students’ AI Literacy. In Proceedings of the 52nd
ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE ’21), pp. 191-
concepts and implications. We iteratively gathered and 197. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3408877.3432513
implemented feedback from a middle school student advisor and 9 [3] Duri Long and Brian Magerko, 2020. What is AI Literacy? Competencies and
Design Considerations. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’20), pp. 1–16.
classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376727
distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and [4] David Touretzky, Christina Gardner-McCune, Fred Martin, and Deborah
the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this Seehorn, 2019. Envisioning AI for K-12: What Should Every Child Know about
work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author(s). AI? In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 33(01), pp.
SIGCSE 2023, March 15–18, 2023, Toronto, ON, Canada 9795-9799. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v33i01.33019795
© 2023 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). [5] Ning Wang, James Lester, and Satabdi Basu, 2021. Building Capacity for K-12
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9433-8/23/03. Artificial Intelligence Education Research: Workshop 1 Report.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3545947.3576224

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