Your students are already using AI. Most have no idea how it works, and the stakes just got real: essays, applications, and academic integrity policies.
 
AI Literacy Unplugged is a complete five-day high school unit that teaches how AI actually works and how to use it wisely, with zero devices required. Print it, teach it, done. No logins, no filters to fight, no tech to crash. Every lesson runs in one 45-50 minute class period.
 
This is not a week of lectures. Students program a human robot, train a classifier by hand, fact-check a confident AI answer against real sources, out-prompt a too-literal Genie, and take a physical stand in a Four Corners ethics debate.
 
The five-day arc:
Day 1, What Is AI, Really? Students write "programs" for a literal robot partner and discover why computers need precision.
Day 2, How Do Machines Learn? Pairs learn a rule from training cards, and half the class inherits biased data without knowing it.
Day 3, When AI Gets It Wrong. Students fact-check a confident AI answer and catch its hallucinations using a source pack.
Day 4, Talking to Machines. The WISH checklist turns vague prompts into strong ones, in a game against a literal Genie.
Day 5, Should We? Four Corners debates on essays, deepfakes, AI art, and jobs, plus a graded one-pager with the PAUSE ethics lens.
 
What is included for every lesson:
Complete teacher guide with pacing, objectives, and vocabulary
Minute-by-minute lesson flow with teacher tips
Debrief discussion guide with the responses to listen for
Ready-to-print student handouts and activity materials
Cut-apart exit tickets
Answer key and look-fors, with guidance for using exit tickets as formative data
 
The unit also includes a Four Corners facilitation guide with legitimate arguments for both sides of every statement, and a 16-point grading rubric for the ethics one-pager that grades reasoning, never position.
 
Why teachers reach for this unit: nothing crashes, students are out of their seats, and every debrief question comes with the answers to listen for, so you can teach it cold. Days connect with built-in callbacks, and each day's exit tickets become the next day's warm-up.
 
Aligned to ISTE Standards for Students and the AI4K12 Five Big Ideas in AI.
 
Built for grades 9-12 in tech, computer science, ELA, advisory, library media, or any class wrestling with AI. Use it as a full week, a semester of stand-alone Fridays, or emergency sub plans that actually teach something.
 
The week ends where it should: not with how AI works, but with the person using it. Because the goal was never the machine. It is the thinking human in front of it.
 
Questions? Find me at teachwiseai.com or @teachwiseai. I would love to hear how the debates go.