Challenges such as hallucinations, biased outputs, and deepfakes underscore the need for AI literacy that helps users question, verify, and make sense of AI outputs. Furthermore, AI literacy in early childhood education (ages 3-8) remains an underdeveloped research area, compared to the rapidly expanding body of work for adults and older students. Yet significant challenges remain, including limited AI knowledge among caregivers and educators, a lack of validated age-appropriate curricula, and ongoing concerns about overuse, privacy abuse, security risks, anthropomorphism, and misunderstandings of AI capabilities. This workshop brings together researchers, educators, and designers to envision what community-centered AI literacy might look like.
The goal of this workshop is to call for a more holistic integration between child development, learning sciences, and child-computer interaction to move beyond fragmented, exploratory interventions towards coherent, scalable models of early AI literacy education. Specifically, we ask:
How might children’s literacy in AI be supported by strengthening the capacity of adults and institutions around them?
What would it mean to ensure that parents, teachers, and community members have the resources and understanding needed to guide children’s engagement with AI?
And how do researchers and designers create AI literacy initiatives that are inclusive, sustainable, and responsive to the diverse contexts in which children encounter these technologies?
By bringing together diverse perspectives and experiences, we hope to identify actionable pathways forward that can inform the design of more equitable and effective AI literacy initiatives for children and the communities that support them.