9-12:03:AI’s Impact – Benefits, Challenges, and Ethical Seeds (Enhanced)

Students face an AI ethical dilemma head-on, prepare for a debate, revisit the myths from week 1, and plant the ethical thinking that runs through the rest of the course.

Ethics is introduced early and deliberately, before any coding, so that when students build models in Module 2 they already ask who benefits, who is harmed and who decides. The debate format teaches them to argue a position they may not hold.

What students do
• Evocation: an AI ethical dilemma – “What are the biggest benefits and concerns about AI? How might AI make mistakes?”
• Debate Prep: benefits and challenges for individuals and society
• Myth-Busting Revisited: how an AI trained only on one kind of cat picture struggles with the rest – how bias enters through data
• Reflection Journal with true/false; assignment: find a news report on an AI ethics problem and decide whether it came from the learning or the data

By the end, students can
• Benefits versus challenges, with evidence
• Structured argument
• A shared ethical vocabulary

Learning focus (Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning): Human Dimension · Integration.

Debate-based lesson; suits classrooms. Part of Grades 9–12: AI & You, Module 1 – Discovering AI – What, Where, and Why?, Week 3. Next lesson: The Future of AI – Personal Vision and Critical Thinking.