NCERT releases 20-hour AI module for students in Classes 9 to 12

India’s National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the national body for school curriculum, released an introductory AI and computational thinking module for students in Classes 9 to 12 on 23 October, Hindustan Times reported. The 20-hour, activity-based programme brings lessons on deepfakes, checking AI-generated information and protecting personal data into a resource designed for students with no prior knowledge of AI. Its suggested teaching plan can be followed with shared devices or without computers.

NCERT’s five units start with familiar AI

Faculty members from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, IIT Jodhpur and NCERT developed the module, which follows the National Education Policy 2020, the Free Press Journal reported. It starts with applications students may already use, including predictive smartphone keyboards and music recommendations. The first unit uses such examples to introduce pattern recognition and the difference between recognising a pattern and understanding its context.

The second unit turns to learning from examples. Students train an image classifier to distinguish ordinary objects, then test where it fails. The exercise is intended to make the quality and variety of training data visible in the system’s results. Across the five units, practical work, discussion and reflection take precedence over memorising definitions. Students also keep a “Curious Notebook” in which they record observations and reasoning as they work through activities.

The sequence gives students a way to examine AI output before they are asked to use a tool for their own work. Later activities have them write and revise prompts, assess the responses and record corrections they had to make. The module calls this a “helper-stance”: students use a tool to improve their work while remaining responsible for their own thinking.

Deepfakes and the DPDP Act enter lessons

The third unit, “When AI Gets It Wrong”, deals with misinformation, deepfakes and AI hallucinations. Students consider how a plausible-sounding answer can be wrong and learn a five-step method for checking information before they rely on it or pass it on. That places verification alongside an account of how AI systems learn, rather than treating misleading output as a topic separate from the technology.

Privacy occupies the fourth unit. Students are introduced to consent, fairness and digital safety, as well as India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023. They examine the privacy policies of applications they use, looking at what information an app collects, who might receive it and how long it may be kept. The module cautions against entering Aadhaar or PAN numbers, passwords, one-time passwords and personal documents into AI tools. The fifth unit returns to tool use, with students refining prompts and checking the output against their own work.

NCERT director Dinesh Prasad Saklani said in the module’s foreword that students are taught to safeguard personal information, verify AI-generated material, identify misleading content and seek help from trusted adults, The Tribune reported. NCERT described the teaching approach as a combination of discussion, exercises, experimentation and reflection that can be used with or without digital devices.

The 20-hour plan has three teaching modes

The suggested schedule allows 20 classroom hours. An activity can use a device for each student or pair, a teacher-led demonstration on a shared screen, or an exercise conducted through paper and discussion. The paper-based option lets schools with limited devices or internet connectivity carry out the core activities. Those choices concern how the same introductory material is taught: a classroom can discuss an AI system’s behaviour even when students cannot each run one.

NCERT’s material asks students to keep their Curious Notebook through the five units, recording what they observe, how they reason and what they learn from activities that go wrong.