A parent’s guide: what your child learns about AI — and what they don’t

Your child probably uses AI already. It suggests the next word on the phone keyboard, picks the next video, translates a sign, answers a homework question in a second. Most parents I speak to have the same two worries: Is my child learning anything, or is the machine doing it for them? and What does all this know about my child?

Both are the right questions. Here is what we teach, in plain words, and what we refuse to do.

First: what is AI?

The Class 6 book starts with a definition simple enough to remember:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a computer doing a task that usually needs human intelligence — recognising a face, understanding speech, making a choice.

And a few lessons later, the idea that makes modern AI different from an ordinary program:

Machine Learning (ML) is a machine learning from data instead of rules a person wrote.

Everything else your child learns builds on those two sentences. A spam filter, a face unlock, a chatbot — each one learned from examples, and each one is only as good, and as fair, as those examples.

What your child learns, class by class

Each class has one book, and each book has a project at the end of every unit instead of a question paper:

• Class 6 — Understanding AI: what AI is and isn't, five kinds of data, patterns and predictions, decision trees (sorting apples), privacy and passwords, and thinking step by step like a programmer.
• Class 7 — How AI Makes Predictions: classification, regression and clustering; how a machine "sees" and reads; AI in healthcare, orchards and saffron; honest charts; and bias.
• Class 8 — Building With AI: building a small model through every stage, what "generative" means, deepfakes and misinformation, hallucination, and fairness.
• Class 9 — AI Foundations and Class 10 — AI in Practice: the CBSE AI subject — data, models, evaluation, computer vision, language, ethics — and a first taste of Python.

Every lesson is open to read: you can sit with your child and read the same lesson they did in class. There is a short glossary of every AI word the books use, explained the way the books explain it.

What they are taught not to trust

This is the part parents tell me surprises them most. A good AI course spends as much time on judgement as on skill. Your child will meet lines like these:

• "Use AI to help you think, never to do your thinking for you, and say when you used it." (Class 7)
• "Fluent is not the same as true. No source, no sentence." (Class 8, on why AI makes things up)
• "Check before you share." (Class 8, on misinformation)

They also learn the test for whether using AI was honest: afterwards, can you explain the work without it? If not, the tool did the learning, and the child didn't. (More on that in Help or cheating?.)

What a school platform should never collect

India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 treats everyone under 18 as a child. It requires verifiable parental consent before a child's personal data is processed, and it prohibits tracking, behavioural monitoring and targeted advertising directed at children. (DPDP Act, 2023, section 9; CyberPeace)

Here is what that means on AmanahVale, in practice:

• Your child never signs up. Their teacher creates the account, after recording that a parent agreed. Your child signs in with a class code, a username and a PIN.
• No email, phone number, date of birth, address or photo of your child is collected.
• No leaderboards, no ranking. Nothing compares your child with another child.
• Guesses are private. When a lesson asks your child to predict something, nobody — not even the teacher — sees what they guessed, so they can guess freely and be wrong.
• Your child's account can be deleted, with everything in it. (How to delete an account)

The full details are in our privacy page. Whatever platform your child's school uses, these are fair questions to ask of it.

Questions to ask at home

Every lesson ends with a question to argue about. A few work well at the dinner table:

• A practice app keeps a record of every mistake every child has ever made. Is that record helpful, harmful, or both? Who should be allowed to see it?
• Two students hand in the same work. One used AI and said so. One used AI and didn't. What does the second one lose — and when does he find out?
• A tool that answered "I do not know" whenever it was unsure would be less impressive and more useful. Why aren't tools built that way?

You don't need to know the answers. Asking is the lesson.