NCERT is revolutionising the way students are taught in their classrooms. On 23 October, Friday, the National Council of Educational Research and Training has released a 20-hour, activity-based introductory module on Computational Thinking and Artificial Intelligence for Classes 9 to 12.
It demystifies AI through real-life examples and hands-on classroom exercises rather than rote learning.
Developed with faculty from IIT Madras and IIT Jodhpur, the module assumes no prior AI knowledge and prioritises practical exercises, discussions, and reflection over technical definitions.
At the heart of the module is an experiential learning approach that connects abstract AI concepts to students’ everyday observations.
In the first unit, “AI is Already in Your Life,” students distinguish between simple devices, rule-based automation, and learning-based AI. A pressure cooker responds to physical pressure, a FASTag follows set rules, and a smartphone keyboard predicts the next word by learning patterns from examples.
The unit also illustrates where pattern-matching can fall short: Inaya, a student from Bhopal, discovers that her translation app renders the Hindi idiom “mere bhai ne naak mein dum kar diya hai” as “my brother has put life into my nose,” showing how AI can translate words but struggle with cultural context.
The second unit, “How Machines Learn from Examples,” translates theory into a concrete classroom activity. Students train a classifier using pictures of blue pens, red pens, and erasers, then test it on unfamiliar objects.
Karthik, a student from Visakhapatnam, finds that a classifier trained on his own pen may fail to recognise a different brand a lesson that “narrow examples produce narrow learning”. By deliberately trying to break the classifier, students see how a system’s performance depends on its training data and why it must be evaluated beyond the cases on which it was trained.
The third unit, “When AI Gets It Wrong,” tackles confident but incorrect outputs, misinformation, and manipulated images. Students conduct a “Hallucination Hunt,” asking an AI assistant questions about a subject they know, and learn five checks: source, claim type, comparison, pause, and confidence, before relying on or sharing an answer.
The fourth unit, “Your Data, Your Rights, Your Responsibility,” uses everyday digital decisions to teach privacy and consent. Students dissect an app’s privacy policy, considering what data it collects, why, with whom it shares it, how long it retains it, and how to delete it. Scenarios include whether to upload school notes containing classmates’ personal details and what to do when a face-recognition system repeatedly rejects someone at a metro gate.
The final unit, “Working with Modern AI Tools,” encourages students to use AI as a helper rather than a replacement for their own thinking. Rohan, a Class 10 student from Bhubaneswar, uses an AI tool to prepare maths practice questions for his mother’s neighbourhood class.
His first prompt produces uneven, contextually unfamiliar questions; he refines it to specify Grade 4 two-digit multiplication and settings familiar to children in coastal Odisha, such as fish markets, school tiffin, and birds at Chilika Lake. The exercise demonstrates how breaking a task into specific requirements and refining a prompt can make AI output more useful while leaving the user responsible for judging and adapting it.
NCERT said the activities can be conducted with or without digital devices. Students also maintain a “Curious Notebook,” a running portfolio that includes an AI diary, classifier tests, a verification checklist, a privacy analysis and a prompt library.
“The module encourages students to become informed, confident, and responsible users of technology, while reinforcing that human judgement, creativity, and ethical responsibility remain central to learning,” NCERT said.
