Download Thinking with KIBO for free from KinderLab Robotics.
Thinking with KIBO is a curriculum introducing early elementary age children to core concepts of Artificial Intelligence (AI), using KIBO as an “object to think with” (borrowing Seymour Papert’s phrase from his 1980 book Mindstorms). Although KIBO is not an advanced AI system, working with KIBO provides children with a concrete way to approach the concepts. Thinking with KIBO is designed as a supplemental curriculum of 5 one-hour lessons, to be implemented once students are already familiar with the basics of KIBO operation.
The curriculum is designed to support the AI4K12 Content Guidelines, and I’m happy that the curriculum is listed on AI4K12’s resources page.
I oversaw the creation of this curriculum during 2023, when AI had just burst onto the scene as a dominant topic in computer science education. At KinderLab, we felt it was critical to teach young children about AI — how it works, what its limitations are, what its value can be — before they were faced with actually using AI in the classroom. We released Thinking with KIBO as a free PDF in late 2023 and it has been downloaded thousands of times since then.