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Bot Tamers

An AI curriculum for homeschool, ages 8 to 12

By the Bot Tamers team. Last updated .

If you homeschool a child of 8 to 12, you may be wondering whether AI belongs in your plan, and what it would look like. You do not need a computer science background to teach it. Here is what a sound AI curriculum covers at this age, how to judge one, and a simple week you can run at home.

What a sound AI curriculum covers

The Five Big Ideas. AI4K12, an initiative jointly sponsored by AAAI and CSTA, organizes its K-12 guidelines around five ideas:

  1. Perception: "Computers perceive the world using sensors."
  2. Representation and reasoning: "Agents maintain representations of the world and use them for reasoning."
  3. Learning: "Computers can learn from data."
  4. Natural interaction: "Intelligent agents require many kinds of knowledge to interact naturally with humans."
  5. Societal impact: "AI can impact society in both positive and negative ways."

AI4K12 sets out its guidelines in grade bands; a child of 8 to 12 falls roughly in the 3-5 and 6-8 bands.

The AI Literacy Framework. The European Commission and the OECD published a draft of this framework for primary and secondary education in May 2025, then a final version shaped by feedback from more than 2,000 people. It groups 19 competences into four domains: Engage with AI, Create with AI, Manage AI, and Shape AI.

US guidance. An April 2025 executive order, "Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth," called for resources "focused on teaching K-12 students foundational AI literacy and critical thinking skills." At the state level, the California Department of Education's model policy on AI in education (which it says is not mandatory) recommends developmentally appropriate instruction in AI safety and AI literacy, built on the same five concepts AI4K12 uses. It also names checking skills: "claim extraction, confidence calibration, source triangulation, and mismatch detection." In plain words: pick out the claim, judge how sure to be, check other sources, and notice when things do not match.

Put together, a sound curriculum for this age covers how AI learns from examples, why it can be wrong, how to check it, and how it affects people, including privacy and fairness.

How to judge an AI curriculum

These questions work for any program, including ours.

  • Does it teach the ideas, or only one tool? Using one app is not the same as understanding AI.
  • Does your child do something, or only watch? Kids should test an idea and see the result.
  • Does it practice checking? Not just mention it.
  • Does it fit the age? Short lessons and plain words matter at 8 to 12.
  • Can you see what your child can do? A list of finished lessons tells you less than a check your child had to pass.
  • What happens to your child's data? Does your child type to a live AI? What is stored, and who holds the account? Our guide on whether ChatGPT is safe for kids has a fuller checklist.

A simple weekly plan

About 20 to 30 minutes a day, four days a week. Use any curriculum for Day 1, or none at all.

  1. Day 1, learn one idea. One short lesson on a single concept, such as "AI learns from examples." Ask your child to explain it back in their own words.
  2. Day 2, try it together. Use an AI tool side by side and talk about what it got right and what it got wrong. Many general chatbots set a minimum age of 13 in their terms, so for Day 2 and Day 3, use your own account with you at the keyboard, or a tool made for this age.
  3. Day 3, check it. Ask an AI for five facts on a topic your child knows, then check each one. Our guide on teaching kids to fact-check AI has the steps.
  4. Day 4, talk and write. One open question at the table, then two or three sentences in a notebook: what did I learn, and what would I still check? Our guide on how to talk to your child about AI has questions to use.

Repeat with a new idea each week, and over a term aim to touch all five big ideas.

How Bot Tamers fits

Bot Tamers is a course of short lessons, about 10 minutes each, in two tracks. Here is how its units line up with the big ideas, plus checking.

Ages 8 to 10, seven lessons:

  • Learning: "How does AI learn?" and "When AI is unfair"
  • Natural interaction: "Tell Bit exactly what you want" and "AI is a tool, not a friend"
  • Societal impact: "Keep your info private," "Is it real or AI-made?" and "When AI is unfair"
  • Checking: "Checking what AI tells you"

Ages 11 to 12, seven units and a final project:

  • Learning: "What is AI?" (exact rules versus learning from examples) and "How AI learns"
  • Natural interaction: "How chatbots talk" and "Asking better questions"
  • Societal impact: "Safe and fair" and "AI and you"
  • Checking: "AI gets it wrong," and the final project, "Fix it and make it yours"

Bot Tamers has no lessons of its own on perception (sensors) or representation and reasoning, so those are good topics for your Day 2 and Day 4 sessions.

A lesson fits Day 1 of the plan above. Each ends with a "show a grown-up" step, one sentence your child says to you and one question to ask you, which can start your Day 4 talk. Your parent dashboard marks each skill once your child has shown they can do it. There is no live chatbot: Bit, the robot in every lesson, is scripted. See every skill on the curriculum page, and how we handle privacy on our safety page.

Kids do Bot Tamers lessons on our website, on a computer, iPad or phone. 7 days free, then $19.99/month or $199.99/year. Renews automatically until canceled. Cancel anytime in Settings in your parent area, then Manage subscription. Cancel before the trial ends and you won't be charged. You can create a parent account on our website now, and add each child to it.

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