Guide

AIQ and the Philippines' national AI literacy push

In January 2026, the Department of Education launched Project AGAP.AI, a national program treating AI literacy as a life skill for Filipino students, teachers, and parents. In February 2026, DepEd followed with Order No. 003, s. 2026, "Foundational Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence in Basic Education." AIQ is an independent, free curriculum that happens to teach exactly the skills these guidelines call for.

What this page is not: AIQ is not an official DepEd program, contractor, or partner, and this page is not a government publication. It explains, independently, how our free curriculum supports goals the Department of Education has already set publicly. Schools and teachers are free to use AIQ as a supplementary resource, the same way they would any other free educational tool.

What DepEd actually announced

Project AGAP.AI ("Accelerating Governance and Adaptive Pedagogy through Artificial Intelligence") — launched January 2026 with the ASEAN Foundation and Google.org, aiming to reach over a million Filipino learners, teachers, and parents with AI-skills training.
DepEd Order No. 003, s. 2026 — "Foundational Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Basic Education," dated February 20, 2026, signed by Education Secretary Sonny Angara. It sets rules for how AI may (and may not) be used in schools, requires a Privacy Impact Assessment and AI Registry entry before any school deploys an AI tool, and places extra safeguards — supervision and parental notification — around direct AI interaction for Kindergarten to Grade 3.

Sources: deped.gov.ph, Philippine Information Agency

Where AIQ already fits

AIQ teaches about AI — it isn't an AI tool a child converses with. The safeguards in DO 003 target direct interaction with generative AI systems, particularly for K–3. AIQ's youngest tier, Explorer (ages 5–7), has no chat or generative AI feature at all — it teaches AI concepts through stories and games, the same way a media-literacy lesson teaches about advertising without running ads at the child.
Free, with no procurement needed. DepEd's guidelines assume most schools are resource-constrained. AIQ requires no budget approval, no installation, and works on a shared Chromebook.
Built around the same AI4K12 framework that underlies most credible K-12 AI curricula worldwide — see What Is AI Literacy?
A teacher-controlled roster, not an open platform. A teacher creates a class and only ever sees their own students, echoing the "school official" oversight model these guidelines assume.

Is AIQ aligned to our curriculum? A straight answer

That's the first question every Philippine school administrator asks — and honestly, nobody has published a good answer for AI literacy specifically, because the MATATAG K-10 curriculum guide for EPP/TLE does not mention artificial intelligence anywhere. We read the official 51-page curriculum guide in full and confirmed it: no "artificial intelligence," no "AI," at any grade level.

So rather than force a fake one-to-one alignment, here is the honest picture: where AIQ's six worlds genuinely land on existing MATATAG EPP/TLE content, and where they don't.

AIQ World	Closest MATATAG touchpoint	Grade	Fit
1. What is AI?	Introduction to Computer; block coding (algorithm, process flowchart)	Gr. 4, Q1	Partial
2. How AI Sees & Hears	No MATATAG competency covers this	—	None
3. How AI Learns	No MATATAG competency covers this	—	None
4. AI in the Real World	Trends and Issues in ICT; ICT sectors & careers	Gr. 7–10	Partial
5. Is AI Fair?	Digital Citizenship (online safety); Information Literacy's own "filtering fake news" example	Gr. 4 + cross-grade	Strong
6. Build the Future	ICT entrepreneurship; Learning & Innovation ("simple robotics system")	Gr. 7–10	Partial

The strongest match isn't a coincidence: MATATAG's own worked example for ICT information literacy is "filtering fake news/information, assessing the credibility of the site." That's precisely what AIQ's Deepfakes & Misinfo lesson teaches. The two worlds with no fit at all — how AI perceives the world, and how machine learning actually works — are genuinely absent from the K-10 curriculum, which is the actual gap AIQ exists to fill.

Download the full matrix (CSV) — includes lesson counts and the sourced reasoning behind every row.

Source: MATATAG EPP/TLE Curriculum Guide, Grades 4 and 7, deped.gov.ph. AIQ is not a DepEd-endorsed curriculum mapping; this is our own reading of the public curriculum guide.

What a school should still do

Nothing here substitutes for a school's own compliance process. A school considering AIQ (or any AI-related tool) should still run its own Privacy Impact Assessment and registry check under DO 003, s. 2026, and should read AIQ's own privacy policy as part of that review.

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