How ZEROTH maps to Utah and Idaho's AI literacy language

We publish a crosswalk mapping ZEROTH's Worlds onto the statutory language in Utah's HB 218 and Idaho's SB 1227, plus Idaho's approved standard codes. It says "aligned to" and "prepares for." It never says "meets the requirement," and it never will, because ZEROTH is independent curriculum that is not accredited, awards no credit and is not a state-approved course anywhere.

That distinction is not modesty. It is the difference between a document a school administrator can use and one that embarrasses you at a review.

Why only two states

Because only two have language specific enough to map against. Utah's HB 218 gives four concepts in one clause — capabilities, limitations, ethical considerations, societal implications — inside a list of sixteen digital-skills topics. Idaho's SB 1227 gives a statutory description plus standards the State Board approved on 12 August 2026, with coded statements at grade bands.

Every other state with enacted law either governs adult conduct rather than student learning, or points at a computer-science requirement without saying what the AI part contains. There is nothing there to map to. A crosswalk claiming alignment with fifteen states would be padding.

What the Utah side looks like

Utah's clause is short enough to quote in full: "artificial intelligence literacy, including understanding artificial intelligence capabilities, limitations, ethical considerations, and societal implications."

The crosswalk takes those four and shows where each is taught. Capabilities and limitations sit in World 1, where a learner meets a model and is walked into its failure modes deliberately. Ethical considerations run through every World rather than sitting in one, because the course is built ethics-first. Societal implications land hardest in the later Worlds, where the questions become about hiring, justice and work.

We also map the neighbouring sixteen concepts where the course genuinely touches them — misinformation and media manipulation, intellectual property and fair use, algorithms and their influence, critical thinking in digital environments — and we leave blank the ones it does not. A crosswalk with no gaps in it is a crosswalk nobody checked.

What the Idaho side looks like

Idaho is the more useful half, because the statements are specific. The grade 6-8 AI strands cover explaining how people design, train and monitor systems and why humans stay responsible; analyzing how training data quality affects outcomes; evaluating tools for fairness, accessibility, transparency, privacy, safety, intellectual property and accuracy; academic integrity and acknowledging AI assistance; recognizing that AI lacks sentience, emotions and beliefs; and deliberately stress-testing models to find their limits.

That last one — "challenge AI models by purposefully experimenting with complex prompts to discover their limitations, recognize potential errors, and understand when outputs are unreliable" — is the standard we are proudest to map against, because it is the hardest to assess and the one most courses quietly omit. In ZEROTH it is a Quest, not a mention.

The 9-12 standards are organized into AI Fluency, AI Impact and AI Technical Aptitude. ZEROTH maps well onto the first two and only partially onto the third, which contains data analysis and AI methods content that belongs in a computer-science course. We say so in the document.

What the crosswalk deliberately does not do

It does not claim credit, accreditation or state approval. It does not claim to satisfy a graduation requirement. It does not claim alignment to published Utah standards, because there are none — the State Board's standards are due beginning with 2027-28 and have not appeared. And it does not treat Idaho's standards as final, because they still need legislative approval.

Every one of those caveats is in the document itself, not in a footnote.

What it is actually for

Three situations. A homeschooling parent writing a transcript who wants to describe the course in language a reviewer recognizes. An ESA administrator asking what a curriculum purchase covers. And a co-op leader or small school deciding whether this course does what their state says students should learn.

In all three the useful thing is not a claim of compliance. It is a page that lets somebody see for themselves, with the statutory text on one side and the Worlds on the other.

How to get it, and when it changes

Write to us and we will send it the same day, along with the one-page course of study and the honest hour count. It gets revised when Utah's Board publishes, when Idaho's standards clear the Legislature, and whenever another state's language becomes specific enough to be worth mapping. We would rather revise it publicly than let it quietly go stale.