What's in the AI Literacy Unit

AI Literacy is the Typing.com unit that teaches students what artificial intelligence is, how it is built, and how to use it carefully. This article says where the unit sits, how big it is at each grade, what a student does in each kind of lesson, and exactly what happens in the lessons that talk to an AI.

AI Literacy requires PLUS, and carries a gold crown in the curriculum rail to say so. It appears in eleven curricula, 3rd Grade through 12th Grade and Adult Learner, in the Beyond Typing group of the rail. At the head of the lesson list an overview card describes the unit and carries a thumbnail that opens its film, which is on YouTube as AI Literacy.

The unit is a different size in each grade band: 10 lessons in 2 sections at 3rd through 5th Grade, 23 lessons in 4 sections at 6th through 8th, and 34 lessons in 5 sections at 9th through 12th Grade and Adult Learner.

Two sections run through every band. AI Foundations and AI Ethics & Safety are there from 3rd Grade, How AI Works and AI in the Real World are added at 6th, and Transparency & Accountability at 9th.

5th Grade shows the unit at its smallest. Its ten lessons are:

• AI Foundations - What is AI?, AI as My Co-Creator, How People Learn vs. How Computers Learn, Teaching Computers: Data and Training, AI Science Communicator, AI Systems and Society

• AI Ethics & Safety - Using AI Responsibly & Safely, When AI Gets It Wrong: Mistakes and Fairness, Understanding AI Limitations, AI and Creativity

Three kinds of lesson make up the unit.

• A Multiple Choice lesson opens on a short film with a passage to read beneath it, and ends on Read Transcript, which puts the words in a window of their own, and Begin Quiz. Four of the ten 5th Grade lessons are this kind.

• A Type your Own Path lesson has the student type part of a story and then choose how it continues. Three of the ten.

• An AI Prompt lesson is one of the interactive lessons described below. Three of the ten.

In an interactive lesson the student builds a prompt and TypeAI writes a story from it. Every interactive AI lesson in Typing.com sits inside this unit: three per unit at 3rd through 5th Grade, six at 6th through 8th, and eight at 9th through 12th Grade and Adult Learner.

A student never writes their own words to the AI. The prompt is a fill-in-the-blank sentence, and every blank in it is a dropdown whose options are all written by Typing.com.

The lesson opens as an ordinary reading screen and ends it with Start Interactive Lesson, which opens a panel headed Welcome to TypeAI. In the 5th Grade lesson AI as My Co-Creator the sentence reads: Create a comic strip where the main character is a [select main character] and the setting is [select setting]. The central problem is one where [select problem or challenge]. The first dropdown offers fifteen characters to choose between, from a kid inventor with a jetpack backpack to a baker who makes magical breads, and Send to TypeAI stays unavailable until every blank has been filled.

Once the sentence is sent, TypeAI writes the story and the lesson carries on screen by screen.

TypeAI also writes the practice stories in Problem Keys, which is a free unit of its own.

AI Literacy has its own box on the Lessons tab of Class Settings, so you can switch the whole unit off for a class, or expand it and switch off lessons one at a time. Hide Specific Content and Lessons has the steps.

Typing.com sets the unit out lesson by lesson, grade by grade, with the standards it is aligned to, on the AI Literacy curriculum page. In the Teacher Portal, Curriculum in the left-hand menu opens the same lessons for the curriculum a class is on.

Pro-Tip: every lesson row carries a Preview button that opens the lesson exactly as a student sees it, the TypeAI panel included. Nothing done in a preview is recorded against a student.