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Computational Thinking
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Session 04 / 04· Verify the machine

Truth in the Age of AI

Verify before you trust or share — including when the expert is a chatbot.

Grades 8–1260 minuteslive clicker activities

The hook

“Deepfakes, viral lies, and AI that invents facts with a straight face — how to tell what's real, including when the “expert” answering you is a chatbot.”

What students learn

  • The SIFT method: Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace claims to the original.
  • Lateral reading: leave the page and check the source in new tabs.
  • Why a strong emotional reaction is the moment your judgement is weakest.
  • How to make an AI cite its sources — and verify those sources actually exist.
  • The “confidence gap”: people are far worse at spotting fakes than they think.

The promise

Students leave with a practical verification toolkit — the SIFT method — that works directly on social media, deepfakes, and an AI's own answers.

Lands on

Never ship or share an AI answer unverified. The model's confidence is not evidence — trace it, check it, climb the Ladder.

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. Here are this session's loops.

The hour, beat by beat

  1. 1

    Stop

    The habit: a strong reaction is the cue to slow down, not speed up.

  2. 2

    Investigate the source

    Lateral reading — leave the page and find out who's talking.

  3. 3

    Find & trace

    Get to the original context of a claim, quote, or image.

  4. 4

    Real or AI?

    Practise on real, current cases, then reveal the confidence gap.

  5. 5

    Verify the chatbot

    The capstone: make the model cite, then check the citations.

Drawn from

  • Caulfield — SIFT / Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers
  • Gregory (WITNESS) — guidance on deepfakes
  • MIT Media Lab — Detect Fakes
  • Bergstrom & West — Calling Bullshit

All sources are paraphrased; quotes are short and attributed. We teach the same skepticism toward AI that we teach toward any confident claim.

Next session

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

Decode any answer

Ready to book?

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

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