How do I teach AI literacy without a computer lab or a budget?

You can teach AI literacy well with one screen at the front of the room, the free tier of a couple of tools, and about an hour a week. The parts of this subject that cost money — device fleets, platform licenses, vendor training days — are the parts that matter least. The parts that matter are conversation, comparison and checking, and those are close to free.

Start with one screen, not thirty

A single shared screen is arguably better than one device per student for the first several weeks. Everyone sees the same output, the discussion is collective, and you control the pace. You can run a whole term of genuinely good AI literacy this way: pose the question, take suggestions for the prompt, project the answer, and spend the bulk of the lesson picking it apart.

The lesson is in the picking apart. The typing is not the lesson.

The unplugged half is not a compromise

A surprising amount of this subject works better on paper. Idaho's draft K-8 standards explicitly allow an "unplugged process" for the modeling work, which tells you the state's own curriculum people reached the same conclusion.

Sort a pile by hand. Give groups thirty slips of paper — headlines, photos, product reviews — and ask them to invent rules for sorting them into two categories. Then ask what happens to the items that do not fit, and who decided the categories. That is classification, training data and bias in twenty minutes with no electricity.

Play the prediction game. One student reads a sentence one word at a time; the class guesses the next word. Tally the hits. Then ask what a machine doing this a trillion times would be good at, and what it would never be good at. Students arrive at the mechanism themselves.

Run a citation hunt. Print a generated paragraph with five references. Give the class fifteen minutes and a library catalogue to find out which exist. The ones that do not will be remembered for years.

Free tiers are enough, with two cautions

The free tiers of the major tools are more than adequate for teaching. Two things to get right.

First, age terms. Most major AI services set a minimum age of thirteen, and some require parental consent below eighteen. Check the current terms for whatever you use, and if you have students under thirteen, run everything from the teacher's screen — which is what most under-13 provision should look like anyway.

Second, what you type in. Treat anything entered into a consumer tool as leaving your control. No student names, no grades, no safeguarding detail, no assessment data. Say this to students as a rule with a reason, because that rule is the one they will still need at twenty-five.

An hour a week, for a term

A shape that works: ten minutes on a single concept, twenty minutes doing something with it, twenty minutes arguing about what it means, ten minutes writing down what changed. The writing at the end is not padding — it is where the judgment consolidates, and it is the only artifact you can assess.

You do not need to cover the field. Six ideas taught properly beat twenty ideas mentioned.

You do not have to be the expert

This is the objection we hear most from co-op leaders, and it is the least true. Nobody in the room is an expert on a technology this young, and pretending otherwise damages your credibility the first time a student catches you out. Model the checking instead. "I do not know — how would we find out?" is a better lesson than any answer you could give.

What you do need is material you have not had to write yourself at eleven at night, and a set of questions that reliably produce a good argument.

What a bought course should do for you

If you are considering paying for something, the test is whether it removes preparation rather than adding it. A course that requires a training day, a platform login for every student, and a subscription that lapses has moved the work rather than done it.

ZEROTH is built the other way round: it installs into your own Google Classroom in one go, it marks its own quizzes, it runs on free tool tiers and any Chromebook, and there is no account with us. A Family license is thirty dollars a Semester for up to six learners; a Classroom license is fifty dollars for up to thirty. World 1 is free and complete, so you can run a full unit with your group before deciding anything.