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Computational Thinking
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Session 01 / 04· Decode any answer

How to Not Be Fooled (by Your Brain or Your Chatbot)

Decode any confident answer, from a person, a statistic, or an AI.

  • Grades 8–12
  • 60 minutes
  • live clicker activities

The hook

“Your brain wants a good story; data wants to ruin it, and so does your AI. AI was trained on us, so it inherits our blind spots.”

What students learn

  • How predictable thinking bugs (anchoring, priming, the confidence trap) steer your judgement, and a chatbot's.
  • The course's most useful AI skill: decoding an LLM's answer with the Ladder of Misinference.
  • Why a hallucination is a statement wearing the costume of proof.
  • How to spot misleading graphs and statistics, whether a human or an AI made them.
  • Why the same prompt can give different answers, and what to do about it.

The promise

By the end, students can take any confident answer, from a person, a statistic, or a chatbot, and climb the Ladder of Misinference to test it: statement → fact → data → evidence → proof.

Lands on

Certainty is not accuracy, in your head or in a chatbot. Always ask which rung of the Ladder you are on.

The interactive AI demos

Every idea is a Mirror Move

We run it on the room, show it inside the machine, prove it on a live chatbot, then name the skill. This session's loops:

The hour, beat by beat

  1. 1

    Your brain has bugs

    Anchoring and priming, run live on the room, then mirrored in the model.

  2. 2

    Numbers and graphs lie

    The gee-whiz axis, which-average tricks; AI generates and swallows the same ones.

  3. 3

    Randomness fools us

    Why one chatbot run is never the whole story.

  4. 4

    Confident ≠ correct

    An LLM's fluent confidence is not evidence.

  5. 5

    Science self-corrects, and so should you

    Climb the Ladder of Misinference on a chatbot's answer, together.

  6. 6

    Empowering close

    Rosling-style optimism: with these skills, AI is an extraordinary tool.

Drawn from

  • Kahneman — Thinking, Fast and Slow
  • Edmans — May Contain Lies (the Ladder of Misinference)
  • Huff — How to Lie with Statistics
  • Kahneman, Sibony & Sunstein — Noise
  • Rosling — Factfulness

Sources are paraphrased; quotes are short and attributed. We teach the same scepticism toward AI as toward any confident claim.

Next session

Thinking Like a Computer (So You Can Talk to One)

Direct the machine

Ready to book?

Run this session standalone, or as part of the four-session package.

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