How do you guide children in AI use in primary school?

Almost 80% of children in upper primary school use AI. That is shown by research from Driestar Educatief, which we published about last week. Almost 40% of those children trust the outcome blindly. And of the children who do check, more than four in ten do so based on how the answer sounds.

So how can you guide them in this?

At home it might simply start with exemplary use of AI: show children what answer you get yourself and how you check it. By using other sources, by consulting others or experts, or simply by asking follow-up questions.

At school you can shape this more structurally. In years 5 and 6, I recently gave, with great pleasure, a guest lesson in which this topic also came up. (If there is interest, I'm happy to share the PowerPoint.)

What did we do, among other things?

We started with a story the children know well: the riddle of Samson: "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness."

First we recalled together what happened and what it meant. Then we tried whether ChatGPT (in consultation with the school leadership) would have as much trouble with it as the Philistines did back then. That turned out to differ per child. We discussed exactly what they had entered and why it worked for one and not the other.

While the PowerPoint showed a picture of the dead lion and a fierce Philistine, we then went, via voice mode, into conversation with a Philistine from Samson's days. The children asked the best questions: "Didn't you also think it was a bit mean to pressure Samson's wife like that?"

After that we did a fact-check of ChatGPT's output, the images and the voice conversation, against the Bible story.

And well... it turned out that the picture that had earlier seemed to fit the dead lion so nicely didn't actually match the time indication in the Bible.

That was of course not the end of the lesson, but maybe this little example offers a handle for working with children on a more critical attitude. The children, in any case, thought it was a fun lesson!