From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis
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Sometimes we let the AI get it wrong. YES! This is something I do in my classroom where we intentionally analyze what AI does right and wrong. The only difference is these CodeAI activities are super easy for students to use AND free AND have guardrails to protect students. At ISTE 2026 this year, I went to the CodeAI classroom and took a class. I came away very impressed with the lessons CodeAI gives away for free.
Sponsored: Today's show is sponsored by CodeAI. I highly recommend CodeAI and their free AI +CS curriculum and this show is being aired as a result of them sponsoring my time at ISTE 2026. Thank you to CodeAI for making this episode possible.
Now, if you're wondering, Hour of Code, which was “code.org” (we say code dot org) has rebranded as CodeAI. They have so many free resources for teaching both Computer Science and AI in any class (even non-Computer Science classes) and to kids of all ages. They also have unplugged lessons and activities where students learn about AI, bias, and how it works. I highly recommend CodeAI as a great place to start as you bring AI education into your school. Sit down and play with it and find some great lessons you can use in your classroom. We dig into what they have, wisdom on teaching AI, and some nuanced counterintuitive thoughts on teaching AI in the classroom.
“The tool use is not the same as educating students about how these tools work.”
Karim Meghji
President and CEO, CodeAI
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Karim Meghji is the President and CEO at Code.org, the nonprofit dedicated to ensuring every student in every school has the opportunity to learn computer science and AI. Code.org is known worldwide for Hour of Code and the new Hour of AI.
Karim previously served as the CPO at Code.org, leading the global effort to bring CS and AI into K-12 classrooms. His path was shaped in high school, when a teacher inspired a lifelong passion for technical problem-solving — a “lightbulb moment” that now fuels his mission to empower students everywhere. A seasoned executive with experience in scaling high-growth companies, he has served in leadership roles at Remitly, Booking.com and RealNetworks. He is dedicated to the vision that teaching students how technology works gives them the agency to build the future.
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Vicki Davis: We don't have to be a mechanic to drive a car, but it really does help to know how the car works. That's how today's guest, Karim Meghji, thinks about AI in the classroom. So today for Tech Tool Tuesday, we're going to look at CodeAI, the free tool that lets our students pop the hood on AI instead of just typing in the box. Now, CodeAI is from the nonprofit that we used to call Code.org. And they've built a tool that will change how schools all over the world teach about artificial intelligence. Today's show is sponsored by CodeAI. I highly recommend CodeAI and the tools that they've built in their free AI and computer science curriculum.
Vicki Davis: This show is being aired as a result of CodeAI sponsoring my time at ISTE 2026 this year. Thank you to CodeAI for making this episode possible.
Announcer: This is the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.
Vicki Davis: Our guest today is someone that I first sat down with about a very big idea that AI literacy belongs in every classroom, not just the computer science lab. Karim Meghji is president and CEO of CodeAI, the nonprofit formerly known as Code.org. And the organization behind Hour of Code, which got me started on Python, by the way, Thank you for that. And now, Hour of AI. When Karim was on the show earlier this year, we dug into why students needed to understand what's happening under the hood of these tools and not just use them.
Vicki Davis: We talked about computational thinking to unplugged AI activities to a wonderful line that you said that you don't have to be a mechanic to drive a car, but it does help to know how the car works. So CodeAI has stepped into a brand new chapter, and we are filming this at ISTE 2026, and really trying to help students understand AI and not just use it. So Karim, thanks for coming back to the show. So you spent… Three and a half years as product development for Code.org. What made you decide that, okay, we need to focus on kids understanding AI? Like, now is the time.
Karim Meghji: That moment began years before we rebranded. It began when we started thinking about computational thinking and computer science as a foundational skill that every student needed to have as they went through their K-12 experience, given that our world is so digital. And so understanding the world is why we started teaching computer science to begin with. We actually wrote our first AI curriculum in 2018 for middle school students. But I will say that and then another AI activity that we built called AI for Oceans, it's for slightly younger students.
Karim Meghji: Those moments when we put that curriculum into the classroom in 2018, 2019, 2020, we really saw the power of showing kids how to think about demystification in technology and how important that is in their lives. As generative AI has come on the scene, I think that just underscored even more the need for unboxing this technology. I think when we last talked, we talked a little bit about the glass box versus the black box.
Karim Meghji: And so our brand change is really to reflect that, that now, in addition to demystifying computer science and technology, generally speaking, demystifying AI and getting into, a situation where students can look at the glass box and see how it's working and maybe have a screwdriver and take it apart is as important in a world with AI as it was in a world with just computer science.
Vicki Davis: So, Karim, I was in your classroom today and I took a class and I thought it was really interesting how you designed it because, for example, they had us generate a healthy meal and there was definite cultural bias to that healthy meal. And we got to talk about the bias that we saw. We can talk to kids all day long, but if they don't experience it, they don't understand it. What are your thoughts behind how you designed the AI interactions that you have for free on CodeAI?
Karim Meghji: So we do think a lot about not just how AI works, goes right, works well, answers the question, whatever that case may be that a student may be looking for. But we also try and build into our curriculum moments where it does something that's worth inspection, worth looking at a little more closely, whether it's, in this example, a bias situation, or we have other lessons where we actually have the AI answer incorrectly, the answer to the question, to show them what it would look like when AI doesn't answer correctly. And then we inspect that and through the curriculum, through the teacher-led experience and through the classroom discussion that occurs.
Karim Meghji: And you might have noticed that today, actually, as you went through our curriculum and our little setup. A lot of our work is not just the curriculum online. It's actually the discussions that occur next to the curriculum. And that's where there's a lot of rich activity for students to learn about the nuances, especially in a world where this technology is not deterministic.
Vicki Davis: You said a couple of times, they said, who is in control, you or the AI? Where did you come up with that line? I love it.
Karim Meghji: A lot of this is about leveraging the language around human in the loop. But there's another step that the human shouldn't just be in a loop. They should actually be in driving. So human in the loop could be sitting in the passenger seat if we're going to use the car analogy, which we've talked a little bit about the last time we talked about that. And so this idea that actually, you know, you actually control, direct, steer, guide, lead an AI system to solving a problem, to engaging in a new learning experience, but it should be you as the student, as the adult that should guide what the outcome is, not sit passively.
Karim Meghji: We want an active participant, not a passive participant in this experience. Yeah.
Vicki Davis: Karim, 18 years from now, when somebody's done CodeAI from kindergarten all the way up, what is that student able to do when they graduate from high school? What does success look like there?
Karim Meghji: The first thing is they'll be able to look at outputs from AI and question. What am I seeing? Should I accept the first answer? Should I push it? Should I question it? How do I question the system to produce hopefully a better answer and an answer that they can maybe actually go validate separately? So learning the art of validation, which I think is general media literacy skill, I think is something that they will be able to do because they'll have, it's not a skepticism is the right word, but a healthy relationship with the AI system because they understand what's happening under the hood.
Karim Meghji: Part of the challenge is because AI systems sound so authoritative and they sound so human as a human, young or old, we accept it. But if you understand it's a machine, it reduces that level of trust you have with that machine and gets you to a place where maybe you have a healthier relationship. So I think that's part one. And the other thing that I think is going to be really interesting to your question about what happens after 18 years of learning about AI, we're, I think, going to see a transformation and democratization of building technical things.
Karim Meghji: You know, there are a lot of students out there who now vibe code games or adults who are putting together vibe code solutions for, you know, products they want to build. I was speaking with someone earlier today, an entrepreneur who has no technical background after just a few courses, a little bit of, learning about AI and computer science, just a little bit, now is building a business around a product they're excited about, designing the product, designing the marketing, creating videos, all of these things that otherwise. They wouldn't be able to do as a single individual. So I think it's going to really democratize the ability to build and create.
Karim Meghji: Which puts us in a world where, again, what we're building and creating are technical artifacts. And so understanding how they work is going to be important as they proliferate. I think we'll have a lot of builders in 18 years. I think it's going to look very different. And then I think the third thing is. And I think this is the interesting question, like we're going to have AI systems talking to other AI systems. And what does that look like? I do think at some point AI systems are going to interact and we'll have to cross that bridge, what that looks like in terms of learning and how to work in a world that looks like that.
Karim Meghji: And part of it, what I mean is not only human to human, human to AI, but AI to AI. What does that all look like? And I think the student who's gone through their, K through 12 education, learning about AI is going to be more comfortable understanding how to manage and work in that world than the student that doesn't.
Vicki Davis: Karim, you have a panel, as we're recording this at ISTE 2026, about putting students at the center. And what does responsible, trustworthy AI education look like? Because I will say this, one of the things that pleased me the most about the class today was your definitions of artificial intelligence because I have warned teachers in a session this morning, if you use AI to write the definitions for AI, It anthropomorphizes itself terribly. I loved how you said AI is a machine. And I think that's trustworthy as a teacher. So what does it look like for you? What do you want that to be?
Karim Meghji: Yeah, I think trustworthy education starts with the fact that, you know, AI isn't building the education itself, to your point. If you're going to start anywhere with AI education, it starts with humans teaching humans about what the machine is doing. The other thing I was going to say is, you know, there's a lot of talk, especially at this conference, about safety in the classroom. Safety of these tools. And I think it's a really important conversation. There's an interesting, anecdote from Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation, where he talks about we sometimes overprotect in the physical world and underprotect in the digital world, right?
Karim Meghji: I think a lot of folks that are listening, that'll resonate with them. And I was thinking about the fact that I think the same applies to education. I think we might be overeducating in some spaces and undereducating in the digital space. So I see that as an important like step to trustworthy and safe AI education, which is let's educate our students, not using the tool. The tool use is not the same as educating students about how these tools work. That I think is safety and trustworthiness. So I want to see more of that. That'd be my definition.
Vicki Davis: I love the prompts today that I did in the class, but I'm curious, what guardrails do you have on the back end to keep kids safe when they're using your free resources at CodeAI?
Karim Meghji: Yeah, so we have a whole set of technology. When a student enters the prompt, there's a set of filters that that prompt goes through even before it sees an AI system. Then an AI system kicks in to look at the prompt to, again, check it. Then it goes into the actual model where we're asking the question. And then as the response comes back, it has another AI system and filtering. So both on the input and the output side, we're looking at and inspecting what interaction is about to occur. And we test hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of prompts and set a very high threshold for success rate or failure rate, as the case may be.
Karim Meghji: These systems are never going to be at the level we can get 100% success because we can't cover every possible prompt and they'll break it. We call it jailbreaking. They will jailbreak our products. But by running hundreds of prompts, you put your mind in the context of a young person and then you you try a lot of those prompts and you automate these things and then you redo these things again and again and again. Right. So the combination of having a good data set, growing that data set, testing and then having these what we call a pre and post filter are how we ensure that we maintain a very high bar on the safety of the product itself.
Vicki Davis: I've always recommended for years Code.org for learning how to code. And now it's CodeAI because you've already done a lot of really hard work. And it's not easy to just bring AI. Like, I would never just… Bring AI into a school without considering these things. But when we choose not to have a plan, that's what we're doing because it's already there. I mean, the statistics on how many kids are using AI is up in the 70% from what I've read recently. They're using it. So using your tools at CodeAI, I'm really a fan of the prompt method and all the stuff I went through today. And you can't do all that in 50 minutes.
Vicki Davis: So if you are talking to a teacher, they're not a computer science teacher, but they're like, it's the right thing to do to teach my students about AI. Where do they start on your site?
Karim Meghji: Yeah, the first thing that they can do is take our professional development courses. We have a set that just gets teachers going, like gets them comfortable. But you want to get to that next level of understanding about what's happening with these tools. Step one is take a little bit of professional development courses. The other thing you can do is actually take the student-facing curriculum, like you did today and like many teachers have been doing at the conference. The best part about it is, you know, we're all kind of beginners at this point, right?
Karim Meghji: I think it can be difficult to be a teacher in a classroom right now because, you know, we come into that mindset as a teacher that we've got to be able to answer the questions that our students are going to ask us. This is a moment where, and, you know, even CodeAI, we are beginners right now as we learn how to build curriculum and technology around AI. But the more we're willing to do it with the community, and I think the more that teachers are willing to do it with their students, I'd say start. That's the name of the game at this point, right? Get in there and learn with your students. I think that's step one.
Karim Meghji: I think the other thing, if you're not using AI, you've got to start. I think that's why I got it. It's so simple to say that, but it is important. And I think using the tools is also one great way to understand how these tools can go really well and where they can go wrong.
Vicki Davis: As we finish up, what's your dream for CodeAI? I mean, you're leading the organization. Where do you want it to go? What impact do you want it to make in classrooms?
Karim Meghji: Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you asked that question, especially across the world. I think that's the, you know, you have to have an aspiration that's sometimes, lofty and big and audacious and one that the organization will keep kind of striving towards. And that is that every student across the globe, K through 12, primary and secondary in a lot of markets outside the U.S., have the opportunity, the ability and the access to foundational AI education that teaches students not just how to use AI tools, but teaches them how the tools work. That's our aspiration.
Vicki Davis: And it's really a big deal because if these kids are making decisions that change our whole world and they don't understand how artificial intelligence—I still know so many adults who think AI is a search engine.
Karim Meghji: Yeah, yeah.
Vicki Davis: And now we have a search engine that is AI, which is—but, you know, just that— You used the word skepticism or that, just that intelligence about how it works. Sometimes it's right and it's really right and it's truly wonderful. But these are the things that are going to make a huge difference for our future. So what's your last encouragement for educators everywhere about why it's time now to bring AI education into their school and not what?
Karim Meghji: You know, I think a lot about the world that our kids are in today. It's a digital world. The devices that we have in our pockets, on our desks, in our living rooms, in our cars, you know, we're surrounded by digital technology. A thousand years ago, we worked in a physical world and agricultural society, or we built things out of rocks and sticks and things around us. And we had to learn about the physical world so we could operate in it. And I think it's an incredible moment right now where the digital world is the world we live in. We need to teach our students about the digital world.
Karim Meghji: So the digital sciences of computer science, AI science, and data science, I think, are really critical. That's the message I would leave with our teachers is, you know, if you want your students to succeed in the world that they're in today and that they are going to be living in as they enter the workforce, embracing the digital sciences as part of that is going to be important.
Vicki Davis: And it doesn't mean you have to be on the screen all the time.
Karim Meghji: Yeah, it doesn't mean screens all the time, exactly.
Vicki Davis: No, it doesn't. In my AP CSP class, we go lids down a lot of times. Absolutely. And we teach XY coordinates. They're in costumes and mapped out with painter's tape on the floor making their robot moves.
Karim Meghji: Some of the best learning occurs when you actually do something and then discuss it. You have a conversation about it. You have different viewpoints on it. So, yeah, absolutely not a screen-oriented activity, but still learning about how the digital world works, right? Yeah.
Vicki Davis: We've been talking with Karim Meghji, head of CodeAI, just about artificial intelligence education. They have a lot of great resources. And thanks for talking with us today. Thanks for tuning in to the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast. Watch the video version of this podcast and catch my new radio and TV show, Cool Cat Teacher Talk, on YouTube and a radio or TV station near you. Join my Cool Cat Teacher Classroom Matters newsletter at coolcatteacher.com forward slash newsletter. Leave a review if you found this helpful. See you later, educator.
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