No one needs training in prompting AI. I could understand if they meant a deeper layer of integrating tech with systems but all they ever mean is typing things in to a text box.
In other words, the aim is to get kids used to using AI as soon as possible, so that they do not learn the skills to function without depending on it.
I can see the angle for making sure kids start using it before they develop the skills to become independent of it.
http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...
It seems to me that if someone can read and think critically-- they can RTFM and get much better much quicker at computers and AI than people who spent all their time tapping an ipad to watch the next video.
It would take a few sessions at most to take someone from 10 years and get them fully up to speed with AI tools since they have zero learning curve.
Evaluating AI output it’s not a skill on its own. It’s just general critical thinking and literacy.
I think it comes easily to the sort of people who comment here. Moat people have a very vague understanding of computers in general.
My 6 year old kid who watches me is a better prompter.
I've been using AI for some legal issues, and it's been incredibly good at searching for case law and summarising the key implications of various statutes - much more efficient than web search, with direct links to the primary sources it finds.
I'm still the one gaming out "What if...?" and "Does that mean..?" scenarios and making sure the answers are grounded in the relevant statutes, and aren't mistakes or hallucinations.
It's not so much a prompting problem as a critical thinking and verbal reasoning problem.
Schools are slow, by the time the teachers get around to teaching the sophisticated techniques you use today, those techniques will be obsolete, the new AI models will require completely different style of prompts.
As for critical thinking and reasoning, those are even harder to teach. How can teachers teach what they don't know?
And that means you have to learn without AI to understand when the AI is wrong. This is just how its dangerous to use a calculator without knowing math since you wont spot when you entered things wrongly etc.
Addiction is a much harder problem than distraction.
I've used them when studying new languages (human languages not programming languages) and ML algorithms and they've been really useful.
Learning to check the citations it gives you is a useful skill too. I wish many adults were more sceptical about the things they are told.
A bit like software development.
You're wasting effort and teaching an obsolete technology if you try to make primary/secondary education too topical. Students can learn how to decompose a task and how to think critically without ever touching a Large Language Model.
(Solidworks, Matlab, GitHub)
Primary schoolers will probably get priced out, and not a day too soon!
Pulling the plug on K-12 on the other hand, seriously, can’t happen fast enough.
Kids are using crappy subscription education services for homework and doing all their reading on screens (and educators are toiling away to work with these systems) because the people who make money off the services and screens paid to have the incentives distorted such that buying their products is the least shitty option.
This would be just the modern version of "Computer class" back in the day when we learned to use word, excel, etc. Just another tool among others that is helpful to learn but should be limited to that specific class.
Though actual sad thing learning from friends with kids is that the modern "computer class" does not actually teach kids to use computers much these days.
When it introduces Harvard vs. Von Neumann architectures, it doesn't invent some dumb RISC computer to illustrate the difference... No... it makes you learn the actual von Neumann machine! Also Conrad Zuse Z machine.
Cragon's argument is that students will not learn the concept of engineering trade-offs, if presented with a clean "textbook" architecture.
I hated MIX for various reasons, it's sort of in-between simple and kludgy.
[0] Cragon was professor at University of Texas Austin ca 1980. Also the architect of TI's ASC in the 1960s.
Eventually everything that can be learned from a book will be done much better by machines, so for humans to have any chance of being employable they'll need to develop the soft skill of working with intelligent machines.
You will not do maths casually until you have memorized enough multiplication to make it not torture. You will not pick up multiplication from using a calculator any more than you will pick up programming from using a computer.
> native speakers of a language will conjugate correctly without memorising
They do not. They have memorized, through massive, constant, and forced practice, and now they conjugate correctly. The alternative of consulting a computer every time they need to speak is not a realistic one.
Sure you will, at least assuming we're still talking about memorizing multiplication tables here and not how to do long division or the like. I don't think algebra or even basic calculus has any convincing need to involve rote memorization.
I've ended up unintentionally memorizing many things due to frequently needing to consult various lookup tables.
> conjugation
Competent ones will. Wrong conjugations usually "sound" wrong to me even when I haven't seen them before and that's in English of all things.
Doing maths is not torture if you do not know multiplication tables if you have a calculator.
Native speakers of a language do not memorise conjugations through forced practice, they memorise through hearing them repeatedly from others.
The entire point of AI is to accommodate the user. AI doesn't do anything that people can't do, is worse at most of those things, but is a lot faster at some of them (basically looking up things.) The point of AI is natural language UI.
Teaching people how to use AI is just teaching people enough about the world to give them something to ask AI for.
Buddy AI is here to stay. You remind me of my 2nd grade teacher who said 'we wont have calculators in our pockets'.
This is bad -- an F grade for the education system that let them slide by without learning an essential skill. The chinese aren't this lazy. And if we persist in not learning this, America's future will regress to us asking them, "Do you want fries with that?"
For one thing you do not need to do much arithmetic to do algebra, for another estimating and getting a feel for numbers is not the same skill as learning a bunch of arithmetic techniques. No one is going to do long division while shopping.
I can keep enough digits in my working memory to do long division in the grocery aisle.
I also compulsively factor numbers on license plates..
In proper countries the price per kg is displayed under the price
The best thing to do is to set the kids up to learn the most important thing - which is how to teach oneself. If a kid can read about something, and then understand what was important from the reading, and then write about it, and then know where to go next they will be well served in the AI world.
My contention is that it's feasible to use laptops in classrooms productively, especially considering the value in applications like word processors. Of course it's necessary to balance the educational value with the potential for distraction. A way to minimize the latter is to extend classroom management to address device use, e.g., instilling discipline. I've personally seen it done well and done poorly (often not attempted at all), and given an otherwise healthy classroom setting, it comes down to discipline and ethics that address device use. That comes after tailoring the specific device format (e.g., tablets lending themselves more to entertainment, socially and habitually) to the appropriate grade level (maturity, responsibility, and technical potential increasing with age).
Some classrooms are too disruptive for device use, but that's not inherently a tech problem, even if you blame disruptive classrooms on broader cultural problems stemming from tech's role in society. Other classrooms exist in cultures that reject the necessary classroom management strategies.
It's not my contention that any device format should be used at any grade level and that distractions can be managed by simply saying "don't" and expecting success.
To address your other point above, yes, reading a book is different, often better, than reading on a screen, even for adults, so I'm also not arguing that devices should replace books.
Are you sure it isn't both? Learning how to bypass the school's internet filtering so that I could get to flash games and reddit probably taught me more than anything in the lessons.
The main problem mentioned in the article you link to seem to be distraction from what they were supposed to be doing.
Distraction is not always bad and kids can learn a lot by being distracted by something that catches their interest. it depends on the approach and its more of a problem following a fixed curriculum in a classroom. Probably more of a problem for uninterested or younger children.
I think video can be a big problem, particularly given the tendency of sites to try to keep you there.
Could any of the IT professionals, here, think of a way around it? Then likely the kids could.
https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/endrer-skolehverdagen-... [link in Norwegian, no English source available]
I am somehow involved in this field and am yet to see an actual paradigm shift anywhere in Europe. Going back to books just mean that we will continue using old methods, because those same old methods moved onto screen didn't bring improvements we though they would as we labeled them digitalisation
Steve Jobs popularized among startup/HN audiences that intuitive interfaces are the best interfaces, but I have yet to see evidence for that. Are systems that work without education truly better than those where you might be a lot more effective with some amount of study? Probably there's an optimal point, like a year of full-time education to use your OS won't pay off at median longevity, but whether <5 minutes of learning is the optimum...
It's great for onboarding people to your tech product, though. Incentives may be misaligned between what's best for the users and what's best for the cashflow
Any scientific backing that screens are at fault? I don't think so. E-ink tablets do exist. When I'm having children, I'm buying them a remarkable with all the books scanned. Sure, they still need physical sheets of paper and a pen, but they don't have to carry 2-3 kgs of literature.
The major reason against digital literature is that it's free, book authors wouldn't get paid and books wouldn't get sold (Wikipedia / OpenStax / pirated books). Money. It's always been about money.
Lots to think about there.
https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scro...
If it was a physical book there is a good chance I will remember a place for the equation, say about 3/4 of the way through the book, near the top of a left hand page and the right had page had a graph showing solutions of the equation.
I can then quickly riffle through the book to find that spot.
With an ebook I get much less sense of place. If what I read on has consistent paging so I've always seen that equation at the same place on the screen I might remember that but not much more. If the "search" function in the reader software isn't good enough to find the equation and I can't think of enough prose that was around it to find it by searching for that it is going to be harder to find than it is in the physical book.
I think the physical books is activating the same mental facilities that are used to organize memories of a physical journey through a space. An ebook doesn't do that for me.
What? Why? And why "naturally" as if this is an entirely uncontroversial statement?
I suspect the people I see saying they were able to not get distracted when using a laptop in class are either outliers or liars.
If such a basic distraction in a digital device isn't fix, it means the experiment wasn't even tried!
no meta-analysis done into this topic could conclude anything beyond the digital medium being a bit more efficient on reading speed. and these studies do not account when comparing one way to the other on the plethora of ways a digital medium can expand knowledge (videos, gifs, images, interactive visualizations and so on)
Screen readers take longer.
Feis A, Lallensack A, Pallante E, Nielsen M, Demarco N, Vasudevan B. Reading Eye Movements Performance on iPad vs Print Using a Visagraph. J Eye Mov Res. 2021 Sep 14
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8557948/?utm_source...
Another
https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~srikur/files/HCII_reading.pdf?ut...
Tangential: One study finds few significant effects of disruptions on just on-screen reading, no printed books.. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
Cited in Card Catalog , Hana Goldin, "What scrolling did to reading" here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scro...
i suggest you do some read, specially of effect sizes found in many studies showing "better performance" (minuscule effect size). there's a plethora of political things you'll ignore by thinking books are better. i gathered you some stuff (there are more than 200,000 people studied on the links i'm sending to you) and i truly hope you don't try to counter-argument by pointing some meta-analysis i linked concluding the analog is better. they admit the effect is minimal to negligent and if you actually consider studies done on text that user doesn't have to "scroll" but rather advance the page with a tap/pgDN and the user don't have their social media hooked on their device (muted or absent), there literally NO EVEDIENCE of any difference between paper and digital learning
[0] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-16892-001
[1] https://futureofreading.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/1-s2.0...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10606230/
[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-025-13843-8
[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277250302...
Wait what?
It's like social media ban for children. If you stop and think about it there is nothing special about children, it's terrible for everyone.
Same in neighbouring Norway. Hi, neighbour! :)
Naturally, the kids should learn AI and AI workflows also. And personal AI assistants can probably help many kids in their studies. Learning AI should be its own subject but that should not ruin the way kids study other subjects where there are proven old ways to get to great results.
Source: I have 10 Finnish kids
Edit: FYI: an old (2018) link to an article about a finding about the matter: https://yle.fi/a/3-10514984 "Finland’s digital-based curriculum impedes learning, researcher finds"