Young children already meet AI. What are we teaching them about it?

Knowing how to use an app is only the beginning

Young children encounter AI through smart toys, recommendation systems and generated media. Yet a new comparison of early-years curriculum documents in four Asia-Pacific countries finds little explicit guidance on what they should learn about it. For educators and families, the gap is about understanding and judgement—not simply getting children to use another app.

A peer-reviewed comparison of curriculum documents in Australia, China, Japan and South Korea finds little explicit guidance. None of the four settings covered all five elements in the researchers’ framework: basic AI concepts, creating AI artefacts, interacting with AI agents, recognising ethical issues and understanding relationships between people and AI.

The national materials examined for China, Japan and South Korea showed no alignment with that full progression. Australia showed limited alignment only through a professional statement that is not a mandatory national curriculum. These are findings about written guidance; the study did not observe children or teachers.

That finding matters because children already encounter recommendation systems, conversational agents, smart toys and generated media before formal schooling. Yet the study does not show that young children should spend more time using AI products, nor that classroom technology produces better learning. Its narrower message is that policy documents rarely tell educators what age-appropriate knowledge, questioning and ethical judgement should develop when AI is already part of children’s environment.[1]

What the researchers actually compared

The multilingual team conducted a document analysis rather than a survey or classroom trial. Qualified early-childhood educators on the author team reviewed core curriculum documents in their original languages or official English translations. They also searched in English, Chinese, Japanese and Korean for later policy statements and guidance that addressed digital technology or AI. Their main scope was national-level material currently used for children aged roughly three to five, although they also discussed five influential Chinese municipal or provincial initiatives because those jurisdictions have been leading curriculum development.

Documents were coded against a previously published five-component learning progression. The method gives readers a consistent comparison across policy systems, but it also imposes one framework on culturally different curricula. A document may develop agency, tool awareness or critical thinking without naming AI, and those capabilities could be missed if they do not fit the five predefined components. The authors explicitly acknowledge that an inductive or culturally specific analysis might surface other forms of relevant learning.[1]

Australia had examples, but not a complete progression

Australia’s national Early Years Learning Framework refers to digital technologies but not explicitly to AI. The researchers found partial alignment in Early Childhood Australia’s 2025 Statement on Young Children and Digital Technologies. It mentions exploring how AI works, educators and children co-creating prompts, encounters with conversational agents and AI embedded in toys or apps, and shared assessment of information quality. Those examples touch foundational concepts, creation, interaction and aspects of ethics.

The gaps are as important as the examples. The statement does not specify a developmental sequence or what successful learning looks like, and ethical obligations are directed mainly at educators and services rather than framed as competencies children should develop. The analysis found no alignment with the human–AI relationship component, which includes readiness, agency, algorithmic bias, social benefit and the idea that people design and control systems. Because the statement is advisory, its presence also does not show consistent classroom provision.[1]

China’s policy activity did not translate into preschool expectations

China’s 2012 national early-learning guidelines contain no explicit reference to digital technologies or to the five AI-literacy components used by the study. The authors additionally examined AI education plans from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Sichuan and Chongqing. Only Shanghai’s 2024–2026 action plan explicitly brought kindergartens into its AI strategy, encouraging teaching practice, experiential activities, innovation laboratories and partnerships with technology companies.

But institutional activity is not the same as a learning progression. The Shanghai plan concentrates on system capacity and facilities rather than specifying what a three-, four- or five-year-old should understand, how an educator should recognise progress, or how children should question generated output. Japan’s early-childhood guidance remained centred on hands-on, non-digital experience, while South Korea’s 2019 Nuri curriculum emphasised physical and naturalistic interaction despite earlier robot pilots. The paper therefore describes a curriculum gap, not an absence of technology or innovation projects.[1]

What teachers and families can use now

The practical implication is not to hand preschool children a chatbot and call that literacy. Educators need concrete, developmentally appropriate ways to help children notice when a response comes from a machine, ask where information came from, compare an answer with trusted human knowledge and understand that an app was made by people with choices and incentives. Those activities can be conversational, playful and low-screen. They should also respect language, disability, local culture and the uneven access children bring from home.

Policy makers can make expectations useful by linking each aim to examples, educator training and observable learning rather than broad calls for innovation. They also need safeguards for privacy, commercial influence and age-inappropriate systems. If guidance simply tells settings to adopt AI, better-resourced centres may buy products while educators remain uncertain about purpose and risk. A curriculum progression should support professional judgement and children’s agency, not turn early childhood into product training.[1]

What the study cannot establish—and what comes next

No children, parents, teachers or classrooms were sampled, so the study cannot estimate how often AI is used, what children understand or whether written curricula match practice. Country comparisons also reflect the documents selected and the framework used. The authors used an LLM during translation and back-translation, then had the multilingual team review and refine the results; culturally embedded policy language may still resist direct translation. The paper reports no dataset because its evidence is public documents rather than participant records.

The assessment would change with observational studies linking written policy to teaching, interviews across urban and rural settings, and trials of age-appropriate activities that measure durable understanding rather than device fluency. Researchers should test whether children can recognise generated content, explain human control, identify uncertainty and transfer those ideas to new systems. Until then, the new paper is strongest as a policy audit: it identifies missing explicit progression, but it does not prove that any proposed curriculum—or any AI product—will benefit a child.[1]