Son's class 6 timetable has 'AI' twice a week. What do they do in it?

citrus_lantern_526510 Jun 2026

Timetable came on the school app today, ahead of reopening. Between maths and Telugu there's a period called AI, twice a week, with its own notebook on the book list. The class teacher's message in the group says 'future skills'. That is not an answer. If your child had this last year, what did they do in those periods? Screens, worksheets, coding, a talk about robots? I'd like to know before he starts telling me he's learning AI.

4 comments

dusk_balcony_164111 Jun 2026
We're at an IB school, so there it's called 'digital design', not AI, but I had the same question last year. It turned out to be half posters about how computers think and half making a chatbot in a block coding app. My son liked the chatbot part. The posters, less.
- sunny_pebble_286311 Jun 2026
  Was the chatbot something he built step by step, or did they use a ready tool and change its answers? Those are quite different skills, and the name on the timetable won't tell you which one the school means.
- coral_puzzle_555512 Jun 2026
  We had the posters too. I asked the teacher at the three-way conference what she wanted them to take away, and she said 'that a computer doesn't think'. That seemed a fair goal for ten-year-olds, so I stopped worrying about the posters.
umber_bookmark_886611 Jun 2026
Different school, different board, but at this age it's mostly unplugged stuff. Sorting, patterns, giving step-by-step instructions to a partner who has to follow them exactly. Screens come in later in the year if at all. Ask for the term plan rather than going by the period name, most schools have one even if they don't send it home 🙂
hazel_bottle_156311 Jun 2026
my son had it in 7th. one month of scratch then a lot of 'write a prompt for this'. he says prompt writing is just english comprehension backwards
banyan_window_473012 Jun 2026
My grandson's class 1 has a lighter version and I've been through his workbook: tracing paths, 'what comes next' patterns, and a page asking which jobs a machine can do and which it can't. Quite sensible, for what it is. I worked in software for forty years and would have been happy with that as a start. Whether the class 6 version is as sensible will depend on who teaches it.