How to teach AI to school children. Safe AI versus Unsafe AI.

This article covers what should happen if we ban the use of AI and the internet for children, and how AI should be taught to schoolchildren.

We have to restrict AI and the internet to children and early teenagers. But if we don’t teach young children the basics of AI, they may feel lost when exposed to adulthood. Children must not feel the pressure of adult life. So, they must be taught. For this, we need servers only for school children, and servers and special AI tools only for learning.

Schoolchildren would be exposed to learning-based safe AI once they are 16–18 years old.

They must know what AI is!

They must know how AI works!

They must know the bad and good things about AI!

How should it all start?

Well, first should be theory. The theory of AI may start with the activation function of a neural network. This can be taught in 6th to 9th grade! Just the basics of supervised learning and unsupervised learning, starting with their own pet cats and dogs, about how they learn. Showing them videos of toddlers learning and other examples, such as a cat teaching its kittens how to climb a tree.

The lab manual must be designed for children.

The lab manual must contain the real-time application of Gen AI and hands-on.

This can be done by keeping limited edition servers.

The servers would be used only in a school network for children’s learning.

A VPN can be provided if parents want to access what is being taught to children from home.

These servers for schoolchildren shall provide responses to restricted question bases in a limited way.

Wrong replies from these servers would be stopped before reaching children.

The servers can even have an LLM/Small language model, trained only on children’s academic books and restricted novels, excluding novels such as Harry Potter. These LLMs for children would respond to lab manual questions; the server would have the right to stop any incorrect or unsafe responses from these LLMs. Only safe responses would be allowed.

The lab manual for 6th graders should be simple and limited to the basics. For a 10th grader, a lab manual can include questions to ask AI or even writing prompts on limited children servers.

We must ensure the right answers from the children’s school network servers.

These are just to give children hands-on experience.

The appropriate grade level to teach these hands-on skills is 10–11th grade, or when the child is 16 years old.

In earlier classes, children can learn the basics of Python, which is essential for working with AI. This can start form 6–7th grade in school.

AI is not just LLMs; it is more than just gen AI. There are AI algorithms that do not require LLMs, but they do require advanced mathematics. So such AI can be introduced to children as a black box, with only application and result computations. The example backpropagation algorithm requires the mathematics of differential equations and partial derivatives; hence, it can’t be taught to schoolchildren. However, the name is enough to introduce it in theory, increasing children’s curiosity by telling them that this takes back the error in weight updation.

All this can make children mature.

Children must be restricted to using children’s servers for homework assignments given by school teachers. They can, if necessary, use the school network VPN to access information while doing some missed classwork from home.

School teachers teaching AI must be well-versed in safe and unsafe AI for kids.

Safe AI, such as a neural network for gene detection, is considered safe AI.

While other AI, such as Grok, can be considered unsafe AI for children.

More on it.

Thank you for reading.

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