A healthy path through an AI World
Last week, I had the opportunity to sit on a panel at the Raising the Future event at the Verulam Hub. I joined Karen Snook’s panel on parenting and mental health in the age of the smartphone, alongside Jim Lewis of Youth Talk and Chen Tsui, Cyber Prevent and Protect at Herts Police.
I work with children early in their lives (generally 7-11), when their confidence, curiosity and relationship with technology is just beginning and still taking shape. I have always tried to encourage them to question what they encounter in the digital world, develop the confidence to make their own choices, and feel comfortable asking for help. But with AI becoming an increasingly familiar part of that world, what else should I be doing?
Listening to Jim and Chen made me reflect on our shared concern for children’s wellbeing and safety. Our roles are very different - the reasons for children to enter Jim and Chen’s realm are obviously complex and multi-layered - but the discussion left me asking what foundations I can help children build now, in my very small part of their lives, that might help.
A healthy path.
Two areas keep coming back to me: giving children opportunities to create, and helping them understand the technology they are using.
Creators versus consumers
My ‘mission’ for Think Big has always been to encourage children to create with technology, rather than simply consume it.
When you see a child’s joy as their friends play a digital game they developed, or when they hold a 3D print of something they imagined, designed and improved, you understand how empowering making something can be.
Their decisions have made something happen. They have experimented, encountered problems and found ways forward. The digital world becomes something they can shape, question and contribute to and is very different from those who simply scroll, watch and accept what happens on their screens.
My discussions with Chen also brought an important responsibility into focus. Creative skills and technical confidence need to develop alongside an understanding of how our actions affect other people. Having the ability to access a system does not give us permission to do so. Being able to create or alter an image of someone does not mean we should share it.
“With great power, comes great responsibility!”
Children need to know the ethical dimension: being able to make something also means considering who it might affect.
As I look ahead, I also have to recognise that AI has complicated my vision of what it means to be a creator. A child can now produce a polished background for a game or an asset for a virtual reality world in seconds. There may be thoughtful choices behind it, but the finished result alone tells me very little about what they have learnt. It certainly does not show how much resilience and perseverance they have had to exhibit. It also does not, without appropriate scaffolding, develop a child’s computational thinking skills.
So what should I, as an educator, now focus on?
This is where I feel understanding now plays such an important part.
Understanding
Research from the Turing Institute has shown that most children who use AI have little or no understanding of what it is and adults have not provided them with any explanations.
AI literacy goes well beyond asking a chatbot a question.
For children, it means beginning to understand what AI can and cannot do, how it learns from examples, datasets, and why its answers can be convincing, biased or wrong. It also means thinking about how to use it safely, thoughtfully and responsibly and what the impacts – both negative and positive – may be in their futures.
That understanding can help children create a solid foundation for questions they will encounter throughout their digital lives. Why am I being shown this video? Why has this particular post been recommended? How can a chatbot sound so certain when its answer is incorrect? What information should I share, and how might it be used?
These questions become easier to explore when children can see, and understand, some of the processes for themselves.
A child who trains a simple AI model can test it with new examples and discover where it makes mistakes. They can investigate whether their training data was too limited or biased, whether something important was missing, and what happens when they change it. They have an opportunity to see why an AI system’s output needs questioning.
There is research showing that very young children can begin to grasp these ideas. MIT’s PopBots study, for example, explored age-appropriate AI activities (not screen-based) with 80 children aged four to six and found that they could understand many of the concepts presented. That does not tell us whether these experiences prevent difficulties later in life, but it does challenge the idea that we must wait until children are older to begin their learning.
We still have so much to learn about how early AI education will affect children over time. For me, the immediate educational value is giving them opportunities to investigate, test and question something that will increasingly influence their lives.
Agency
As I have mentioned in previous blogs, it never fails to dishearten me how worried most children are about AI.
In a workshop just last week, during a discussion about AI and their future, only two out of a class of thirty Year 6 children said they were excited. The other twenty-eight described real worries and anxieties : that there would be no jobs, no water, nothing for them to do.
These are ten and eleven year olds.
This was just one classroom conversation, but it’s striking that the numbers are even worse than this time last year when the ratio was generally 75:25, negative v. positive in my workshops.
In the context of our discussions on the panel about children’s mental health, this must be a concern.
And this, I believe, is where agency matters.
For a child, agency means having a voice, being able to make meaningful choices, and seeing that something they do can make a difference. It might be choosing how a game works, challenging an answer that doesn’t seem right, or deciding to ask a trusted adult for help.
Creating with technology, making mistakes, and understanding how it works can help children practise that agency. They can set a goal, test an idea, examine the result and decide what to do next. The technology may offer suggestions, but the child still needs opportunities to exercise their own judgement, rather than passively accepting what an algorithm dictates.
It traverses us from being a ‘human in the loop’, to being a ‘human in the lead’.
This does not mean expecting children to solve the enormous questions that worry them. They need trusted adults to listen, take their concerns seriously and help them separate what is known, from what is uncertain, or what is misinformation. Adults and the organisations developing these technologies also have responsibilities that cannot be handed to children.
A healthy path
I cannot map out the future for the children I work with. But I can give them opportunities to make choices, test ideas, question answers and discover that they are capable of changing things.
That is where I want Think Big to keep its focus: helping children become thoughtful creators, understand the technology around them, and feel confident enough to ask for help when they need it. Whatever path they take, those are things I hope they can carry with them.
