Free lesson for Grades 7–9. Time: about 25 minutes, with a parent.
What is AI?
Artificial intelligence is software that learns patterns from large amounts of data and uses them to predict, classify or generate things. A spam filter learns what junk messages look like; a chatbot predicts the next likely word. AI does not “know” things the way people do, so it can be confidently wrong.
Activity: AI audit of your home
- List every device and app in the house (phones, TV, M-Pesa app, YouTube, WhatsApp, maps, camera).
- For each, write: does it predict, classify, recommend or generate? Or none?
- For each AI one, write what data it probably learned from (e.g. YouTube: what millions of people watched next).
Experiment: train a human “model”
Parent picks a secret rule (e.g. “fruits that are yellow inside”). Parent shows items one at a time and says “yes” or “no”. The learner must guess the rule from examples only. Then swap. Talk about it: how many examples did you need? What happened with a confusing example? That is exactly how AI training works, and why bad examples give bad AI.
Think critically
- When is it risky to trust an AI answer (homework, health, news)?
- Write one rule your family will follow when using AI tools.
Next step: in the full AI Starter course learners build real mini-projects with free AI tools. See the AI Starter holiday course.
Optional: get the next free AI lesson by email.