Hello, Everyone, allow me to introduce myself, I’m Dr. Miral A Khalil, a pediatrician who studies child and adolescent psychiatry. I’m new to STEM Tuesday and I am excited to dive into this month’s topic of Computers.

I want to discuss AI and how it might work in a classroom.

WHY USE AI?

I’m aware of how polarizing the use of AI is within kid-lit and academia — and I must say that’s warranted, given the legitimate fear of plagiarism, cheating, and theft of intellectual property. But I do insist that, used with some SOP, AI is an incredible tool to teach children anything. Who am I to talk about AI? Teenagers and children alike might assume that as a physician I only look at how AI is revolutionizing biotechnology and medicine. Some might even assume that I must not know what AI is — because 39 years old, is dinosaur era old to many of them.

I, on the other hand, grew up watching The Jetsons [the cartoon from the future], Mission Impossible movies, and Indiana Jones; to their immense dismay, I do know quite a lot about technology.

But what nobody can fathom is my deep admiration for how villains and evil geniuses are portrayed in kid lit and film bypassing technology. Think of a laser trip wire meant to protect museum art — and the burglar who steals it anyway.

HUMANS ARE INTRIGUED BY IT

In short, I absolutely adore how the human mind is able to surmount an apparently insurmountable problem — just like zigzagging through an impossible maze of infrared trip wire without triggering an alarm.

I study child and adolescent psychiatry, so I can say this with some authority: children, adolescents, teens, heck even adults, are often more intrigued by an apparently complex problem being solved. That’s part of why AI has gained such a large footprint in all walks of our life so quickly.

Instead of fearing AI  technology, we must embrace it, learn from it, and command it — not the other way around. This fear trickles down from adults to children, and it’s counterproductive. An ongoing, open conversation around the ethics of usage — even challenging students to find the blind spots in AI — is an incredible way to strengthen their faith in their own intelligence; always being superior to whatever technological advances are being made. The human mind reigns supreme.

ACITIVITIES YOU CAN USE

Today, I’ve brought you a few practical activities that can be done with a group of middle and upper elementary students. But first, I want to highlight two books that I’ve used with my own children and have recommended to other parents.

Book 1 is Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide to Inventing the World, written by Jennifer Swanson and Dylan Thuras and illustrated by Ruby Fresson (2025). This book can be read aloud to children as young as third grade, as it combines both science and geography. I love when a book allows you to travel around the world within its pages — recognizing how human beings ALL around the world have contributed to the technological advances we enjoy today. Giving credit to ALL people isn’t only intellectual honesty; it’s important in today’s ever-polarized society.

Book 2 is Future Tense: How We Made Artificial Intelligence — and How It Will Change Everything, by Martha Brockenbrough (2024). This book is geared toward middle grade, but my rising 5th grader enjoyed it read aloud just as much as my rising 7th grader did. What I truly enjoyed is that it gave me a segue to have a conversation with my almost-teenage son about how AI has its limitations and is NOT superior to the human mind.

Now on to the three practical activities that can be done in a classroom. These activities can help students break down AI and understand how it works for us.

Activity 1 — Drumroll please: build a trip-wire escape room.

Have students design and then attempt to beat their own “laser” security system — the same logic, in miniature, as the museum heist scenes they’ve seen in movies.

Materials: yarn or string in a bright color, painter’s tape, small bells tied to each strand as “alarms,” and a stopwatch. (For older or more advanced students, you can upgrade to a simple circuit kit with a photoresistor and buzzer, or a laser pointer and a small mirror — supervised closely.)

In teams, students string yarn across a doorway or taped-off area at varying heights and angles, tying a bell to each strand. Before they build, have them map their layout on paper first — this is the “algorithm”: a precise, ordered set of instructions for exactly where each strand goes. Then teams swap rooms and try to cross another team’s course without triggering a single bell, timing their attempt.

Debrief as a class: What made a course harder to solve? Did more trip wires make it more secure, or just more predictable? This makes the concept of an algorithm physical — a fixed set of rules a system follows — and it’s a direct, hands-on bridge to how AI systems themselves are built on layered, patterned instructions.

Activity 2 — Investigate the origin of the word “algorithm,” and who pioneered this work.

Algorithm being the basis of most AI technology, we must recognize the role of the people behind it. Have students research where the word comes from (it traces to the 9th-century Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi), what problems his work originally solved, and how that math eventually became the foundation of modern computing. Have them also find one modern example of an algorithm they encounter daily — a search engine, a recommendation feed, a video game’s difficulty setting.

Activity 3 — Investigate “Web War I”: the 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia.

In 2007, Estonia became the target of one of the first large-scale, coordinated cyberattacks on an entire country. Over several weeks, government ministries, banks, and news outlets were knocked offline by waves of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks — essentially a flood of automated, algorithm-driven requests overwhelming a system until it collapses. The attack coincided with a heated political dispute between Estonia and Russia; while much of the malicious traffic was traced to Russian sources, the Russian government denied any official involvement, and it was never definitively proven who ordered the attacks.

Have students research what happened, why it’s sometimes called “Web War I,” and why it led NATO to open a cyber defense research center in Tallinn the following year. It’s a great chance to also talk about attribution — why figuring out who is really behind an attack is one of the hardest problems in cybersecurity, then and now.

Any of these three activities can be assigned as a classroom project and will lead to an incredibly rich discussion covering history, geography, and electronic engineering.

Every one of them asks students to do the same thing a movie villain, a cybersecurity researcher, or an inventor does: look at a system built to be hard to beat, and beat it anyway. That’s not a reason to fear AI.

It’s the best argument for teaching kids to understand it — because the mind that can map a trip-wire course, trace a word to a 9th-century mathematician, or make sense of a real-world cyberattack is the same mind that will never be obsolete.

Dr. Miral A Khalil is a CO-RA for SCBWI MDDEWV. She is a globe trotting pediatrician who homeschools her four children whilst on medical missions.