For teachers and club leaders
Free lesson plans you can teach without AI expertise.
How to use these lessons
- Pick the course that fits your group. Children can go a stage up or down.
- Open the course page and read the lesson plans. Each lesson has a hook, teaching, an activity and a check.
- Check the status note on the course page for any tools you need.
- Use the activities on the Try page on a whiteboard for the teaching moment.
- Print a course page when you want a paper copy. Printing opens every lesson.
- For a practical test with a real AI, use the AI lab guide. It is optional and adult-led.
- Send children to the For kids pages for a version they can follow on their own, for homework, early finishers or a club.
Curriculum notes
The England national curriculum for computing does not mention AI by name. These lessons are tagged to the computer science and digital literacy strands they support (data representation, algorithms, programming and online safety).
The Curriculum and Assessment Review makes AI and digital literacy national priorities and names computing as AI’s home. New programmes of study are due for first teaching from September 2028, and the government aims to publish the final curriculum by spring 2027. Please do not describe these lessons as official AI curriculum coverage until the new programmes of study are final.
Curriculum notes last checked October 2026. Sources: current computing programmes of study (GOV.UK), Teach Computing on the review.
What you need for each course
| Course | Stage | Ready to teach? |
|---|---|---|
| A1 Smart or Not? | Explorers, ages 5 to 7 | Every lesson uses printed or hand-drawn cards, so you can teach it today with no software. |
| A2 Teach a Machine | Builders, ages 7 to 9 | The lesson plans are complete. The classifier tool for lessons 3 to 6 is still being built. Until it is ready, run those lessons with drawn example cards, and use the Try page for the teaching moment. |
| A3 How Machines Learn | Creators, ages 9 to 11 | Lessons 1, 2, 5 and 6 work with cards and discussion today. Lessons 3 and 4 use the classifier tool, which is still being built; until then, build the classifier from sorted drawing cards and a tally sheet. |
| A4 AI in Practice | Coders, ages 11 to 14 | Lessons 5 and 6 can be taught today. Lessons 1 to 4 use a small data library and a nearest-neighbour classifier that are still to be built; until then, teachers can use a spreadsheet or their own short Python scripts. |
Five strands to track
- Understand. AI learns patterns from examples (data). It does not think or feel.
- Use. Use AI tools purposefully and safely, with an adult’s guidance.
- Evaluate. Spot mistakes, made-up answers, bias and fakes, and check against trusted sources.
- Create. Train a small model, then improve it by fixing the data.
- Impact and ethics. Talk about fairness, privacy, honesty, jobs and the environment.
Assessing the A4 end project
Show learners this checklist. They should be able to say they:
- explained how the system learns
- tested it with new data
- identified at least one bias or limit
- suggested an improvement
- used clear, correct vocabulary
Younger children show accuracy as fractions and tallies. Never rank children against each other by score.
Extension ideas
- Rules versus learning (A3 or A4).
- Build a rule-based chatbot in Python with if and elif, then discuss where rules break and why learning from examples can help.
- AI detectives (A3).
- Spot made-up facts in examples you provide, check them against two trusted sources and build a checking checklist.
- Critique an AI tool (A4).
- Write a one-page review of a classifier or a teacher-approved AI tool: what it does well, where it fails, who might be harmed and how to improve it.
- Oops! Robot mistakes (A1).
- Funny picture mix-ups where children explain why a robot was fooled.
Review the lessons every term, because the topic changes quickly, and again when the new curriculum is published.
Classroom safety checklist
- Children never type names, school, address, passwords or photos of faces into any AI tool.
- Use only AI tools your school has approved. Services set their own minimum ages and may use inputs to improve their products, so check their terms first.
- Children under 13 never use a chatbot directly. For a real-AI test (see the AI lab guide), the teacher or another adult types the prompts and reads each answer first.
- Choose any AI outputs you show in advance, so children do not meet harmful or distressing content.
- Ask children to add a short “I used AI to help with…” note to their projects.
- Teach benefits and risks evenly, without hype or fear.
If a child shares something personal, or a worrying answer appears, follow your school’s safeguarding policy and speak to your designated safeguarding lead.
Common misconceptions
- “AI understands like a person.”
- It finds patterns in examples. It does not know what anything means. Use the next-word demo in A4.5 to show this.
- “AI is always right.”
- It can be confidently wrong. Teach the “check it” habit: who made this, what was it trained on, where else can I check?
- “AI is a robot.”
- Most AI is software that sorts, predicts or generates, with no body and no goals of its own.