Proceedings of AIE Symposium 1, Understanding AI in the Classroom: Pupil Perspectives and Practice

This volume collects the proceedings of AIE Symposium 1, the first symposium held by the Institute of AI Education, on 29 June 2026. The symposium looked at how AI is understood in the classroom, with a focus on pupil perspectives and everyday practice.

The four short papers here reflect the Institute's approach: evidence-informed, grounded in real school contexts and led by practitioner voice. They span primary and early years settings, and look at what children actually understand about AI, how they relate to it, and how teachers are bringing it into their classrooms.

The papers in this volume are:

Catherine Moore (Learn Sheffield) reports early findings from a year-long project across nine Sheffield primary schools, on what pupils aged 6 to 11 know about AI, the misconceptions they hold, and what this means for how AI literacy is taught and sequenced.

Sam Clarke (York St John University) presents a case study of 43 Reception children interacting with an AI companion robot, examining how they treat it as a social presence while still recognising it is a machine, and what that means for AI education in the early years.

Nick Huxley (University of Brighton) offers a framework for evaluating AI maths tutors by the quality of thinking they support, asking whether an AI-mediated exchange keeps a child reasoning or quietly does the reasoning for them.

Samuel Sankpo and Percy Kyei Asamoah (Ghana Education Service) describe an unplugged approach to teaching AI concepts without devices, using a Turing Test role-play inside a grammar lesson in a school with no computers or internet access.