AI in 1st Grade Primary School Koabarid (Slovenia)

Publication date: April 14, 2021

By Aurora Calvet, Primary school teacher, Erasmus coordinator and eTwinning teacher

Although we already do many activities about coding, we wanted to introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI) in our primary school. Most of the activities about AI are prepared for older students. This year, we participated in the eTwinning project “Enjoying Coding” with activities that go from pixel art to robotics, from programming Lego to working with materials from code.org.

In Code Week’s online course ‘AI basics for school’, I learned more about AI and I found some great ideas. I decided to try AI for oceans in 1st grade.

I introduced the following idea: We have to teach the robot do discover what a fish is and what is not. When you ask kids: “Isn’t the ocean full of fish, why should we teach a robot?” They know the answer! They know that besides fish, there are also bottles, plastics and garbage in the ocean. We did the activity together with the entire class. One by one, the kids decided if it was a fish or not. They were playing in English the entire time, saying FISH, NO FISH. As the game went on, they got more and more involved. The kids talked about all the garbage, the pollution and other interesting things that are not usually a theme for 1st grade students.

If you would like to try this activity with your class, remember that it can go as long as you want. You could even include more activities about water, oceans, animals and pollution. Perhaps, you can dedicate a whole day to the sea.

From my experience, the code.org activity was a great fit for this age group and I can’t wait to try it in kindergarten with children as young as 5 years.

For more inspirational activities, follow me and my colleagues on Instagram @enjoying.coding.