AIQ
AIQ
Part of the AI Is Everywhere! lesson guide. Teaching a different grade? 🔧 Builder (8–10) · 💻 Hacker (11–14) · ⚡ Architect (15–18)
Gather students on the rug or have them turn to face you — this works best as a call-and-response, not silent reading. Read the app's own opening line out loud, with big energy, as if Pixel (the Explorer-mode mascot) is speaking directly to them:
"Hi there, little explorer! 🌟 Did you know that smart helpers are hiding ALL around your house? Let's go find them!"
Pause after "hiding ALL around your house" and let that land — the goal is genuine surprise, not a rhetorical question. Then ask the class:
"Raise your hand if your family has a phone that knows YOUR face, and unlocks just for you, but not for anyone else. How do you think it knows it's you?"
Take two or three guesses out loud, and accept anything ("it takes a picture," "it's magic," "it remembers you"). Don't correct wrong guesses yet — just say "ooh, interesting idea, let's find out!" and tell them today they're going on a "smart helper hunt" around a whole day, from waking up to bedtime.
At this age, resist the urge to define "AI" as a word up front. Explorer mode never uses the letters "A-I" out loud in its own script, and neither should you — "smart helper" is doing real work here as a plain-language stand-in that a five-year-old can hold onto without needing an abstract definition first. The label comes later; the noticing comes first.
Keep this warm-up brief, around three to five minutes. Explorer-age attention spans do best with a quick emotional hook followed by hands-on interaction with the screen, rather than a long verbal setup — the app's own hook is only two short lines for exactly this reason. If your class is especially chatty, a simple management line works well here: "Smart-helper hunters use their listening ears until it's guessing time!"
Open the lesson on the shared screen (or have students open it themselves if one-device-per-student). The lesson walks through three parts of a day — Morning, School, and Evening — and for each part, shows four things and asks "is this a smart helper (AI), or not?" Walk through it with the class exactly like a guessing game: cover the "isAI" answer with your hand or voice, ask the class to guess first, then reveal.
Before you tap through the first scene, set the expectation: "I'm going to show you something, and everyone gets to guess together — thumbs up for smart helper, thumbs down for not. Then we'll find out the answer together!" Thumbs-up/thumbs-down keeps everyone participating at once instead of turning it into a hands-raised competition, which matters at this age since Explorer mode deliberately has no leaderboards or competitive scoring anywhere in the app.
Morning 🌅 — Show the four things one at a time:
School 🏫 — Repeat the same guess-then-reveal pattern: 📝 Spell Check (smart helper — it learns the difference between "their" and "there"), 📚 Paper Book (not a smart helper — it's ink on paper), 🎮 Game Levels (smart helper — the game gets harder as you get better at it), ✂️ Scissors (not a smart helper — just two blades).
Evening 🌆 — 🎵 Song Picks and 📺 Video Ideas are both smart helpers (they guess what you'll like), 🗺️ GPS Maps is a smart helper (it guesses which road is faster), but 🚲 Bicycle is not — say the app's own line here, it's a nice moment: "Pure mechanics. YOU are the smart part!"
After the three scenes, the app shows a one-line wrap: "AI means a computer that learns from experience — like how you learned the stove is hot. AI does something similar, but with data!" Say this slowly and add your own example: "You learned not to touch a hot stove because it happened to you once. A smart helper 'learns' the same kind of way, but instead of touching things, it looks at LOTS and LOTS of examples."
Let students finish the in-app practice round on their own (or in pairs) — ten more items to sort into "smart helper" or "not." Circulate while they work, since this is where you'll catch the genuinely tricky ones. A few worth watching for and helping with: 🏠 Smart Thermostat is a smart helper (it learns the temperature you like and adjusts on its own), but it looks so ordinary that students often guess "not." 📷 Photo Filters is also a smart helper (it finds your face in the picture to know where to put the puppy ears or flower crown). On the other side, 🔑 Metal Key, 📎 Paper Clip, and 📐 Ruler are all "not a smart helper" — plain objects with one fixed job — and some students will second-guess themselves into calling everything "smart" once they're on a roll of finding smart helpers everywhere. If that happens, ask: "does it learn anything about YOU specifically, or does it do the exact same thing for everybody?"
Keep this discussion short and conversational rather than a formal Q&A — five minutes of a few students answering out loud, with everyone else listening, does more for this age group than trying to collect an answer from every child. If a child gives an answer that mixes up "smart helper" with "magic" or "alive," that's a completely normal stage of thinking at this age and not something to correct firmly; a gentle "it's not magic, it's more like remembering lots and lots of examples" is enough for today.
Close with: "You did it — you found smart helpers hiding all through a whole day! From now on, every time you see something new, you can ask yourself: does it just do ONE thing the same way every time, or does it seem to learn and guess? That question makes you an AI explorer forever."
Extension activity — "Smart Helper or Not" walk: Take the class on a short walk around the classroom or school (or, for homework, around their own house with a parent). At each stop, students point at an object and say out loud "smart helper" or "not a smart helper," and give one reason why. Good stops: a TV remote (not), a smart TV that recommends shows (smart helper), an air conditioner (not), a tablet with voice search (smart helper). If a student picks something you're genuinely unsure about, that's fine to say out loud — "hmm, I'm not sure either, let's think about it together" models exactly the kind of reasoning you want, better than a confident wrong answer would.
To close the walk, gather the class back together and have each student name their favorite "smart helper" they found, and draw a quick picture of it for a shared class chart titled "Smart Helpers We Found Today." Post it somewhere visible — it becomes a running reference the class can add to for the rest of the year whenever a new example comes up, and it turns a single 10–15 minute lesson into an ongoing habit rather than a one-time activity.
If you have a few extra minutes and want a quieter option instead of a walk, a simple sorting-card activity works just as well: pre-print or draw 8–10 small cards showing a mix of items (a toothbrush, a smart speaker, a bicycle bell, a video game, a stapler, a tablet with a drawing app), and have pairs of students physically sort the cards into two piles on their desk — "smart helper" and "not." Walk the room and ask each pair to defend one card from each pile in one sentence.