Teacher Only: An Introduction to the CreatiCode AI Curriculum

CreatiCode

Introduction

CreatiCode is built upon MIT Scratch — the world’s most widely adopted platform for introductory computer science education. By design, it preserves Scratch’s core strengths: intuitive simplicity, open-ended creativity, and a pedagogy grounded in iterative, student-centered learning path — create → share → improve → remix. These elements align closely with constructionist theory, which posits that learners build knowledge most effectively through active creation and social engagement.

CreatiCode extends these foundations by offering a robust suite of tools tailored for artificial intelligence (AI) education. These enhancements provide educators with the resources to deliver meaningful, hands-on AI experiences while maintaining full control over the classroom environment. If you are considering integrating AI lessons into your curriculum using CreatiCode, this guide outlines essential information and pedagogical considerations to support your implementation.

Guiding Principles Behind the AI Curriculum

Our AI curriculum reflects a deliberate and research-informed departure from traditional models. The following core principles guide our approach:

Empowering rather than replacing educators: Central to our philosophy is the belief — strongly supported by educational research — that teachers are indispensable. Human educators offer relational, emotional, and ethical guidance that no algorithm can replicate. They foster student motivation, support diverse learning needs, and create inclusive environments. Accordingly, every CreatiCode lesson and tool is designed with the educator at the center. Technology serves to amplify your presence, not to displace it.
Maximizing engagement within a secure framework: Engagement is a prerequisite for deep learning. Our curriculum emphasizes relevance, agency, and hands-on exploration — principles rooted in experiential learning and motivation theory. At the same time, we recognize the risks associated with generative AI. Every tool on our platform is safeguarded by robust moderation systems, enabling creative freedom within a protected, school-ready environment. This balance is critical to fostering curiosity without compromising safety.
Prioritizing practical application over abstract theory: While foundational knowledge and ethical considerations are important, our curriculum emphasizes constructionist, project-based learning. Students learn best when they build, iterate, and problem-solve in authentic contexts. Each lesson includes practical activities such as creating applications, experimenting with AI tools, and debugging interactive code. Scratch’s visual language removes unnecessary syntactic barriers, enabling students to focus on algorithmic thinking and design. While many curricula focus on AI theory, few offer accessible, hands-on experiences. We aim to fill that gap.
Fostering peer collaboration and social learning: Our curriculum is intentionally designed to incorporate simple yet effective forms of collaborative learning. After each core lesson, students pair up to work on an extension of the program they have just studied. This collaborative phase serves several pedagogical purposes: it reinforces learning through repetition, deepens understanding through practical application, and supports the development of communication and cooperation skills. Drawing from the principles of guided practice and social learning theory, these pair-based activities provide a low-pressure environment for students to review core concepts, troubleshoot with a partner, and internalize what they’ve learned through shared problem-solving.

Overview of AI-related Tools

CreatiCode equips educators with a distinctive array of AI tools that enhance both instructional delivery and student learning outcomes:

AI Coding Assistant: This tool provides intelligent support by explaining code and responding to student queries. The included Socratic Mode is particularly noteworthy — it leverages the Socratic method by prompting students with guided questions rather than offering direct answers. This inquiry-driven approach fosters metacognitive awareness and supports deeper cognitive engagement, helping students bridge knowledge gaps through reasoning and self-discovery. All responses are strictly moderated to maintain a focused, secure, and educationally appropriate dialogue.
AI Image Generator: This feature allows students to generate custom sprite and backdrop images using text-based prompts. It fosters multimodal creativity, enabling visual learners to more fully engage in the design process. As with all AI tools on the platform, both the prompt inputs and generated images are stringently moderated, ensuring a safe, school-appropriate environment for exploration.
AI Coding Blocks: A wide range of specialized coding blocks wraps powerful AI functionality into intuitive, drag-and-drop components. These include blocks for ChatGPT (with safety moderation), text-to-speech synthesis, hand-gesture recognition, and more. These abstractions reduce cognitive load, allowing students to focus on higher-level problem-solving rather than technical intricacies — an essential practice when introducing AI concepts to novice programmers.
Widget Blocks: These blocks provide a rich framework for constructing interactive AI applications. With components such as chat windows, buttons, and text fields, students can quickly design user-friendly interfaces that integrate AI seamlessly. This experience parallels real-world application development, giving students early exposure to essential software engineering concepts, including usability, accessibility, and interface design.
Teacher Control for AI Tools: Educators maintain comprehensive oversight through a class management dashboard. You can selectively enable or disable AI features, monitor student interactions (including chat logs and generated content), and tailor the classroom experience to your pedagogical goals. This aligns with best practices for digital citizenship, ensuring student agency occurs within structured and developmentally appropriate boundaries.

Key Pedagogical Shifts & Considerations

Given the novelty of AI — and particularly generative AI — for many educators, we want to highlight several key differences you will encounter when teaching with these tools. Anticipating these elements will help you plan lessons that are both effective and resilient.

AI is inherently unpredictable: Traditional, rule-based programming produces deterministic outcomes. In contrast, generative AI models (like ChatGPT) rely on probabilistic reasoning, which introduces a degree of unpredictability. The same prompt may yield different outputs depending on subtle contextual factors. For this reason, demonstrations that rely on specific AI responses should be backed by screenshots or saved examples to ensure continuity during class. Understanding this variability is part of helping students develop a more nuanced view of AI’s strengths and limitations.
Writing skills become essential: Communicating effectively with AI— via prompting — requires clarity, structure, and precision. This introduces an interdisciplinary aspect to AI programming classes, where writing skills play an unexpectedly large role. Students must learn to formulate questions and commands thoughtfully, a skill that overlaps with argumentative writing and technical documentation. Our curriculum provides scaffolded practice in prompt design, incorporating repetition and reflection to support skill development. Over time, students become not only better coders but also more effective digital communicators.
Increased emphasis on interface development: While Scratch traditionally emphasizes animated storytelling and sprite interactions, AI-powered projects shift toward interface-centric design. Students build tools rather than narratives, often using widgets — buttons, labels, text fields, chat windows — as the primary building blocks. This shift mirrors the evolution of real-world software from static programs to dynamic, user-facing applications. Through these projects, students learn how to make powerful AI functionality accessible through intuitive design, preparing them for authentic, future-facing development practices.

By embracing these tools and principles, educators can deliver engaging, rigorous, and safe AI education that prepares students not only to use AI, but to understand and shape it. The classroom becomes a space where students transition from consumers of technology to creators and critical thinkers — ready to navigate a world increasingly shaped by intelligent systems.