Free AI Resources for Teachers: Hour of AI and Beyond

Vicki Davis (00:05)
Today’s episode is brought to you by the Educators Studio from Van Andel Institute for Education. If you’re a K through eight STEM teacher looking for classroom tested lessons, hands-on projects, and time-saving resources, you can get an annual membership for only $9.99 using the promo code COOLCAT. More on this after the show.

Vicki Davis (00:32)
Karim Meghji is the President and CEO at Code.org. It is the nonprofit dedicated to ensuring every student in every school has the opportunity to learn computer science and AI. Of course, Code.org has been known for Hour of Code. Now it’s Hour of AI. And Karim, as we talk about artificial intelligence, does it have to be taught just in a computer science class or is this something that could be for all ages and stages of students?

Karim Meghji (01:05)
I love to start with this kind of a question. The answer is no. At the end of the day, AI literacy applicable in the understanding of how to use AI responsibly, ethically — they apply well beyond computer science. So whether it’s in language arts, math, science, there are a lot of applications where using AI done with good guidance from teachers, done well because students understand how and when to use AI, I think is important.

I’ll add the one thing though, and that is that AI literacy should go broader than just how these tools work across subjects. At Code.org, we’ve spent a decade with the mission that computer science is foundational, that every student, just like they learn English, math, and science, should be learning computer science. And so when we think about computer science and AI together, we believe students should not only learn how to use the tools, but how do the tools work? And that does fit within the context of a technical sciences curriculum or course.

Vicki Davis (01:58)
So I love all the content you have. As we were talking before the show, I teach AP Computer Science Principles and some of my favorite tools I found through Code.org many years ago, whether it was Code Combat, the MIT AI curriculum, a lot of different things like that. You have resources that beginning teachers who are just like, hey, I know I need to teach this, but I don’t know where to start — where does a beginner know where to go and what to do?

Karim Meghji (02:25)
You touched on actually probably one of the best places for a teacher who’s dipping their toes in the water of teaching AI to students at all grade levels, by the way. And that is the Hour of AI. We started the Hour of Code years ago and we brought together hundreds of partners across the computer science community, bringing together their expertise and their experience of teaching students computer science in just one hour. And that’s what we did for a decade.

This past year in December 2025, we launched the Hour of AI and have done the same thing. We brought together hundreds of partners who in one hour teach students a variety of aspects of AI. So that would be a great starting point. Go to hourofai.org and see the resources we have there. We have activities by lots of partners that target different age groups, different areas, depending upon what you want to fit it in. Maybe you want to do something in an English class. You’ll be able to find a really good resource for that. That’s the first thing. Just start by doing, and that’s the place to do it.

The other thing that I would say for those who are just starting out is, you know, to be confident at teaching any subject with students, you yourself have to be confident at some level with the subject itself. That’s another area that I would really encourage teachers to engage in, which is the professional learning and development that they need to do. We offer resources — we have an AI 101 curriculum. It’s just a few hours for teachers to start their own journey. So use our resources or there are a lot of other organizations that have these professional learning resources just to get you started. Don’t forget to take care of your own education before you start that next step with students.

Vicki Davis (03:59)
And your computational thinking, which of course is part of the computer science area, is so important. I teach our kindergarten teachers that how you describe your classroom procedures can help your students foster that computational thinking that they need. Thinking in algorithms and steps, being able to break down topics — like these are all things that do impact every area. Okay, we need to maybe shift how we teach those classroom procedures so that we’re incorporating computational thinking. While AI is important and it’s part of what’s going on, also understanding we don’t want all this technology to be a black box to our students. We want them to understand that there’s algorithms and what’s going on behind the scenes, right?

Karim Meghji (04:47)
I completely agree. Computational thinking is a really interesting topic to discuss. Something that I say quite a bit is computational thinking isn’t just about computers. It’s about learning how to solve problems with lots of things. We use computational thinking every day without knowing it or calling it that. It just happens that when we try and structure our instructions for a computer, we speak in computational thinking terms to get that computer to do some of the things we want to do.

So learning things like sequencing and algorithms and pattern matching are important for young learners as they not only engage with the world around them, but with computers directly. Now as we move into this world of AI, this idea of learning what’s happening under the hood gets even more important as these systems interact with us in human-like ways, but they’re not human. And so what’s happening? Probabilities, statistics, pattern matching, data. We want to start teaching about those concepts to students so as their world evolves, they are able to navigate it both as good consumers, but also as creators of a society that can shape those technologies.

Vicki Davis (05:54)
So Karim, one thing I’ve always loved about the Code.org content is that you have all these unplugged activities for teaching computer science. Do you have unplugged activities for teaching about artificial intelligence also? And unplugged means you don’t need a computer. Like you could teach this stuff without a computer. And in many ways, I actually pull a lot of your unplugged content to even use in my AP class because you can get hands-on, you can go lids down with the computers and you can really understand how these things work.

Karim Meghji (06:24)
Love this question, Vicki. Young learners need to be away from devices to be interacting with each other and doing some learning in addition to just the core subject. So yes, we do have unplugged activities for AI. We’ve just begun to develop curriculum around AI unplugged, exploring generative AI as a specific unit that we built for middle school students.

It has two parts. The first part is just unplugged, getting away from the computer, having conversations, having discussions within the classroom itself. Then teachers can choose to take that next step and put them on computers and start to actually make it practical for them, the things that they’ve just learned. Yes, and we expect to do more — especially as we get to K-5, you’ll see more from Code.org in the many months ahead, developing in both high school and elementary school, and middle school actually. But unplugged will be an important component of that for the reasons you described. It’s an important modality because it teaches things like collaboration, communication, all the other skills that we’re also trying to incorporate in the classroom, especially around problem solving and technology.

Vicki Davis (07:31)
I was teaching an AI literacy lesson to my eighth graders today. AI used to come at the end of the semester. It now has to be at the beginning because it’s the elephant in the room and they all want to understand about it — the first wrongful death suit against ChatGPT. And a lot of these concerns, the kids are like, well, how could this happen? You know, and you talk about the Eliza effect.

I think the moment that shocked me was I had a couple of kids when we got through how LLMs work, who looked at me and said, you mean AI doesn’t think and it doesn’t have a brain? They were literally stunned. And I think some of it’s the metaphors maybe used in advertising — we always see the electronic brain or whatever. I had a teacher one time say, I just explained it to my students that it’s just like an electronic brain. And it’s shocking to me sometimes how hungry kids are to actually understand how it works.

Karim Meghji (08:21)
Learning, to your point, about what’s actually happening under the hood is so important, right? I don’t have to be a mechanic to drive a car, but it is good to understand how the car functions and how it works and what the basic physical properties are. And I would argue that the analog applies here in a world with AI where we’re driving AI — we have to understand what it is. It’s a tool that is made up of algorithms, data, math.

Vicki Davis (08:44)
So Karim, let’s talk to educators about where they can start with all of your resources — maybe a few pointers to some of your favorite things that are out there. Let’s just get some starting points for folks as we finish.

Karim Meghji (08:57)
I think elementary school is a great place. We have a lot of really fun activities for students. They learn to use AI. They get exposed to it. It’s a way to dip your toe, both for the teacher and for the students. So that would be my one thought there.

Middle school curriculum — there’s a lot of curriculum that’s developing out there. We’re in the middle of developing our own curriculum. If you go to code.org, you can see some of the stuff that we already have today that does include AI education. We’re making it better. It’s called Computer Science Discoveries. So stay tuned for more there, but it’s also a really good starting point.

On our site, we have resources for a lot of partners, so that’s the last thing I’ll leave you with. Just about any domain of work you want to explore — if you’re teaching English and you want to bring some AI into that, you can find partners and curriculum. So just go to code.org under Teach, you’ll find all of our resources.

Vicki Davis (09:49)
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