Curriculum Guide
Purpose, design, and how to run the Gen AI Literacy Breakouts across grades K–8.
Purpose
The suite builds generative-AI literacy through reasoning. Every activity aligns to the Texas TEKS Technology Applications AI-adjacent strands — Computational Thinking; Creativity & Innovation; Data Literacy; and Practical Technology Concepts — but the deeper goal is critical thinking: students weigh evidence, reject a decoy, and justify each answer before they check it. The through-line across all grades is simple and durable: AI makes guesses from patterns in data, it can be confidently wrong, so you verify.
The CLEAR thinking process
Each lock is designed so a correct guess is not enough — students should be able to explain the reason, which the activity reveals after every solve. That habit is the CLEAR thinking process, a simple critical-thinking checklist students can carry into any claim, source, or AI answer they meet:
Claim What exactly is being said?
- Make the claim specific.
- Make it testable.
Lens What assumptions am I bringing?
- What do I already believe?
- Am I reacting to evidence or past experience?
Evidence What supports the claim?
- Strong: facts, data, direct observations
- Weak: rumors, impressions
- Missing: what do I still need to know?
Alternatives What else could explain this?
- Consider other causes.
- Consider other viewpoints.
- Avoid oversimplifying.
Response What should I do now?
- Ask a question · gather more information · challenge the claim
- Document the issue · speak up · wait
Every breakout is CLEAR practice: the six clues are the Evidence (some strong, some weak, one a true-but-irrelevant decoy); choosing which clue opens which lock forces students to name their Claim and check their Lens; the multi-select lock asks them to sort strong evidence from a plausible distractor; and the revealed reason after each lock models the Response. Push students to say why before they check — grade the reasoning, not the click.
How to deploy
- Any device, any time. Each activity is one self-contained page — no install, no login, no data collected. Share the URL or embed it in your LMS.
- Whole-class or independent. Project and solve together for younger grades; assign independently or in pairs for older ones.
- Multilingual. The 🌐 picker offers English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, and Chinese (translations are AI-seeded, pending native review).
- No live AI required. Activities teach about AI without sending students to any AI product — no accounts, no chatbots, no real product screenshots.
Two lessons per grade
Free featured lessons — one per grade. Each grade has a fully-playable featured breakout on the home page. Use them with anyone, anywhere — no login, nothing collected.
The full per-grade lessons. The complete lesson for each grade (Grades K–8) is also free and open — same engine, same no-login, nothing-collected design. Every teacher page and this guide are open too.
A note on accuracy
AI moves fast, but these activities teach durable ideas — patterns, data, bias, verification, disclosure — not product features. Content uses generic terms (an AI helper, a chatbot, an image generator) and avoids brand names so it stays accurate as tools change.