AI Pre-Literacy: A Developmental Foundation for AI Literacy
Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming embedded in the environments in which children live, play, communicate, and learn. Importantly, AI does not always appear as AI. It may be embedded in children’s toys, games, voice assistants, recommendation systems, adaptive technologies, and other everyday products. Children may therefore experience AI-mediated behaviour without recognizing the systems responsible for it (Kewalramani et al., 2021; Yip et al., 2019).
This emerging condition raises a developmental question that has received comparatively limited conceptual attention:
What precedes formal AI literacy?
AI literacy is an increasingly established educational construct. Long and Magerko (2020) conceptualized AI literacy through competencies required to understand, interact with, and critically evaluate AI. Ng et al. (2021), in a review of the literature, identified dimensions involving understanding AI, using and applying AI, evaluating and creating with AI, and addressing ethical issues.
International policy developments reinforce the importance of these competencies. UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence calls for AI literacy and identifies prerequisite skills including critical and creative thinking, communication, socio-emotional capabilities, and AI ethics (UNESCO, 2021). UNESCO’s AI Competency Framework for Students further emphasizes human-centred thinking, ethics, AI techniques and applications, and AI system design (UNESCO, 2024).
AI literacy, therefore, is fundamentally concerned with knowledge, competencies, critical judgement, and ethical understanding concerning AI.
AI Before It Appears as AI
The developmental challenge begins earlier.
UNICEF’s work on AI and children recognizes that AI is already embedded in children’s everyday environments, including toys, virtual assistants, video games, adaptive learning systems, and recommendation systems. UNICEF’s guidance emphasizes children’s development and well-being, transparency, fairness, safety, and preparation for present and future developments in AI. It also recognizes parents and caregivers as important participants in child-centred AI.
This invisible presence matters because children encounter technological systems during periods of rapid linguistic, cognitive, social, and emotional development. Research demonstrates that young children can form interpretations and emotional responses to responsive technologies even when they do not understand their underlying mechanisms (Yip et al., 2019).
We should not claim that AI directly determines children’s personalities or future behaviour. The evidence does not justify such a deterministic conclusion. A more defensible proposition is that repeated interactions with AI-mediated environments may contribute to children’s emerging expectations concerning agency, trust, decision-making, relationships, and technology. The possible cumulative significance of these orientations for future social life warrants systematic research.
Why Formal AI Literacy Is Not the Primary Construct for Ages 3–7
This argument does not suggest that young children cannot learn about AI. Research demonstrates that developmentally appropriate AI and robotics experiences can be introduced in early childhood (Kewalramani et al., 2021; Su & Yang, 2024).
The issue is different: formal AI literacy should not be assumed to be the only developmental layer through which young children encounter AI.
Children approximately aged 3–7 are developing the linguistic, conceptual, imaginative, reflective, social, and ethical capacities that later support more formal learning. Consequently, the educational question is not simply how to introduce AI concepts earlier, but what developmental foundations should precede formal AI literacy.
Introducing AI Pre-Literacy
We propose the term AI pre-literacy to identify this developmental layer preceding formal AI literacy.
AI pre-literacy is not a simplified form of AI literacy, nor does it propose technical AI instruction for young children. It is a complementary construct concerned with developmental orientation rather than formal competency.
Definition
AI pre-literacy is a developmentally prior, non-instructional, non-assessive, and meaning-centred orientation through which children aged 3–7 progressively develop the linguistic, imaginative, cognitive, attitudinal, and emerging socio-ethical capacities to notice, name, interpret, and reflect upon AI-related or intelligent-seeming phenomena encountered in everyday life, thereby establishing conceptual foundations for later formal AI literacy.
The definition is deliberately precise.
Developmentally prior means that AI pre-literacy precedes formal AI literacy.
Non-instructional means that it does not require formal teaching of algorithms, machine learning, data structures, or system architecture.
Non-assessive means that it is not organized around tests, competency scores, or formal benchmarks.
Meaning-centred means that its primary concern is how children begin to make sense of the phenomena they encounter.
Human-centred means that the emphasis remains on children’s language, imagination, agency, reflection, relationships, and emerging socio-ethical understanding.
Why AI Pre-Literacy Matters
The significance of AI pre-literacy is situated within a wider international concern about preparing children for an AI-shaped world.
UNICEF’s child-centred AI guidance calls for children to be prepared for present and future developments in AI and places children’s development, well-being, safety, fairness, privacy, transparency, and agency within the policy agenda.
The European Commission similarly emphasizes ethical and critical AI literacy and draws attention to the risks and opportunities associated with AI and data in education.
The United States Department of Education recognizes that AI is increasingly embedded in educational technologies and calls for educators, policymakers, researchers, and technology providers to address its implications collaboratively.
The Australian Framework for Generative AI in Schools places human and social well-being, transparency, fairness, accountability, privacy, security, and safety among its guiding principles and explicitly includes parents and guardians among those connected with school education.
The UK Department for Education similarly emphasizes children’s safety, data protection, bias, misinformation, and the importance of considering the impact of AI on learning and human relationships.
These international positions do not establish AI pre-literacy as a field. Rather, they establish the broader educational and social imperative within which the proposed construct becomes relevant.
AI pre-literacy addresses an earlier question:
What developmental foundations enable children to encounter an AI-shaped world thoughtfully before they are ready for formal AI literacy?
Our answer is AI pre-literacy.
Parents as Partners in the Pre-Literacy Stage
Parents have a particularly important role because many children’s earliest encounters with AI occur outside formal schooling. Parents may observe children interacting with intelligent toys, voice-enabled devices, games, recommendations, and adaptive technologies long before a teacher introduces AI as a subject.
AI pre-literacy does not ask parents to become technical AI instructors. It encourages parents to create opportunities for children to notice, describe, question, imagine, compare, predict, reflect, and discuss what they experience.
Parents and teachers can help children explore concepts such as choice, pattern, decision, fairness, responsibility, cause, effect, help, and agency through ordinary play and conversation.
From Concept to Practice
This website will provide books, parent guides, teacher guides, worksheets, and practical tools designed around this developmental purpose.
The aim is not to turn young children into technical AI learners.
It is to help parents and educators create the conditions in which children can begin to develop the language, imagination, agency, questioning, reflection, and emerging socio-ethical awareness needed to live thoughtfully with AI.
AI literacy develops competencies for engaging with AI.
AI pre-literacy develops foundations for making sense of an AI-shaped world.
Formal AI literacy may come later.
The developmental foundations for it begin earlier.
Key Takeaway
Children may encounter AI before they know that AI is present. AI pre-literacy proposes a developmental foundation through which parents and educators can help children begin making sense of that world before formal AI literacy begins.
What About You?
When did you first realize that a child’s toy, game, or everyday device was using AI without the child knowing it?
How do you think parents should respond?
Share your thoughts with us.
References
Kewalramani, S., Kidman, G., & Palaiologou, I. (2021). Using artificial intelligence (AI)-interfaced robotic toys in early childhood settings: A case for children’s inquiry literacy. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 29(5), 652–668.
Long, D., & Magerko, B. (2020). What is AI literacy? Competencies and design considerations. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–16.
Ng, D. T. K., Leung, J. K. L., Chu, S. K. W., & Qiao, M. S. (2021). Conceptualizing AI literacy: An exploratory review. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 2, 100041.
Su, J., & Yang, W. (2024). AI literacy curriculum and its relation to children’s perceptions of robots and attitudes towards engineering and science: An intervention study in early childhood education. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 40(1), 241–253.
UNESCO. (2021). Recommendation on the ethics of artificial intelligence. UNESCO.
UNESCO. (2021). AI and education: Guidance for policy-makers. UNESCO.
UNESCO. (2024). AI competency framework for students. UNESCO.
UNICEF. (2025). Guidance on AI and children: Version 3.0—Recommendations for AI policies and systems that uphold child rights. UNICEF Office of Strategy and Evidence Innocenti.
Yip, J. C., Sobel, K., Gao, X., Hishikawa, A. M., Lim, A., Meng, L., Ofiana, R. F., Park, J., & Hiniker, A. (2019). Laughing is scary, but farting is cute: A conceptual model of children’s perspectives of creepy technologies. Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–15.
About the Authors
Prof. Dr. Shaheen Pasha & Prof. Dr. Muhammad Anwar-ur-Rehman Pasha
Authors and education researchers working on children’s development, education, and the implications of artificial intelligence for the emerging AI-driven society.