Fundamentals · Lesson 2

Research and AI

Find the real answer, catch the confident fake, and use AI without handing it your brain

Grades 7 to 12
Time 2 class periods
Difficulty Beginner

The internet has the answer to almost anything you will ever need to know. It also has a confident, beautifully written, completely wrong answer to the same question, usually higher up the page. Over two days you will learn to search like someone who knows what they are doing, work out whether a source has earned your trust, and use AI in the way that makes you sharper instead of the way that leaves you standing in front of a class unable to explain your own work.

What you'll learn

How to search with operators instead of typing whole questions
How to run the SIFT check on a source before you trust it
How to tell a primary source from someone's summary of one
How to use AI to understand something, and where that crosses into cheating
How to catch a hallucination, which is AI stating something false with total confidence

What you need

A computer with a web browser
An AI tool you are old enough to use. Check the age table on Day 2 before you pick one.
Something you are actually stuck on from another class, for the Day 2 activity

Day 1

Find it and check it

Goal: by the end of today you can find a specific fact fast, and you can say out loud why you do or do not trust the page you found it on.

Step 1: Stop typing questions

Most people type the entire question into the search bar, politely, as though the search engine might be offended otherwise.

What is the best programming language to learn to get a job in 2026?

That works, and it is slow, and the search engine throws away most of those words before it does anything. Here are five operators that do the real work.

Operator	What you type	What it does
Keywords	`best programming language jobs 2026`	Says the same thing with nothing wasted
Quotes	`"entry level" developer salary`	Demands that exact phrase, in that order
Minus	`python tutorial -youtube`	Removes results containing a word
`site:`	`site:nhc.noaa.gov st croix`	Searches inside one website only
`filetype:`	`raspberry pi projects filetype:pdf`	Finds one kind of file

site: is the one that will change how you work. It lets you search inside a source you already trust, instead of searching the entire internet and hoping something honest floats to the top.

Practice on the real thing

Type a query below. The page tells you which operators actually landed.

Checkpoint: you have lit up all four dots at once in a single query.

Step 2: The Search Challenge

Three questions. For each one, write down the exact query you typed and the source you landed on. The query matters as much as the answer.

Find a beginner Raspberry Pi project guide as a PDF. Use filetype:.
Find what the National Hurricane Center itself published about a storm that affected St. Croix. Use site:nhc.noaa.gov.
Find the salary range for a job you would actually want, in the Virgin Islands. Use quotes around the exact phrase.

Question 3 is harder than it looks. Territory specific salary data is thin, and you may not find a clean number.

If you cannot find it, write "I could not find this" and say where you looked. That is a real research result. Inventing a number, or grabbing a US national average and calling it a Virgin Islands number, is how bad information gets made.

Build challenge 1 here first

Get it green below, then run it for real and record where you landed.

Now challenge 2

Straight from the source, not from someone writing about the source.

Checkpoint: both challenges green, then run them for real.

Step 3: Run SIFT before you trust it

Four moves, in order, before you believe anything.

	Move	What you actually do
S	Stop	Do not share it yet. Do not screenshot it yet. Pause.
I	Investigate the source	Who wrote this. What is this site. Are they selling something.
F	Find better coverage	Search the same claim. Does anyone credible say it too.
T	Trace to the original	Articles cite studies. Go read the study.

T is the one everybody skips, and it is where the errors are hiding. An article says "a study found teenagers who code earn more." You trace it back and the study surveyed 200 adults in one city. Nobody technically lied. The claim just quietly grew on its way to the headline.

What a weak source looks like

No author. "Staff Writer", or nothing at all.
No date. You cannot tell if this is from last month or 2014.
Emotional headline. "SHOCKING", "You Won't Believe".
Ads outnumber content. A low effort site making money on clicks.
Nothing cited. Big claims, no links to evidence.
Only one site says it. Nobody credible repeated it.

How much a source is worth

Tier	What it is	Examples
Best	The original thing	Published studies, government data, official documentation
Good	Established outlets and schools	AP, Reuters, BBC, `.edu` sites, MDN Web Docs
Okay to start	Community checked	Stack Overflow answers with high votes, Wikipedia, then follow its sources
Careful	One person's take	Blog posts, videos, social media
Avoid	Made for clicks	No author, filler articles, sites that exist to rank on search

Find one source you trust and one you do not, on any tech topic. Run SIFT on both. Screenshot both and write which SIFT move gave the bad one away.

Checkpoint: two sources, two verdicts, and you can name the move that exposed the weak one.

Before you leave today

A progress check, not the hand-in. The full submission list is at the end.

All four operator dots lit at once in one query
Three Search Challenge queries, the exact text you typed, and the source you landed on
Two screenshots, one trustworthy source and one not, with your SIFT reasoning

Day 2

Use AI without outsourcing your thinking

Goal: by the end of today you can use an AI tool to understand something you were stuck on, and you can catch it being confidently wrong.

Step 1: Pick a tool you are allowed to use

Age rules are real and they are not the same across tools. Checked 9 September 2026.

Tool	Minimum age	Notes
Microsoft Copilot	13	The school supplies this. Default choice for this class.
Google Gemini	13	Under 13 needs a parent managed account
NotebookLM	Follows your Google account	Upload your own notes, get a study guide back
ChatGPT	13, and 13 to 17 need a parent's permission
Claude	18	Most of you cannot use this one
Wolfram Alpha	Basic use needs no account	Math, science, data

About Claude. Anthropic requires every user to be at least 18. There is no school or education exception, so if you are under 18 you may not use it for this class. Use Copilot instead.

The rule for the rest of the year: before you sign up for any tool for this class, check its minimum age, and ask Mr. Krigger if you are not sure. This applies to every tool, not only AI ones.

Step 2: Where the line actually is

Same assignment, two ways of using the same tool.

This is cheating

Write my essay about the American Revolution.

You learned nothing, you handed in work that is not yours, and you cannot survive one follow up question. Mr. Krigger asks follow up questions.

This is learning

I am writing an essay about the American Revolution. Explain the main
causes simply so I understand them before I write anything.

The test is one question: am I using this to understand, or to avoid understanding?

You may use AI to explain things, to help you debug, and to write code when Mr. Krigger approves it or the assignment asks for it. What you submit has to be yours, and you have to be able to explain any part of it on demand.

Step 3: Prompt patterns worth keeping

Try at least two of these on something you are stuck on right now, from any class.

Explain it at my level

Explain how CSS Flexbox works to an 8th grader. Use one real example.

Quiz me, and do not give it away

Give me 5 practice questions on Python loops. Do not show any answers
until I have tried each one.

Check my wrong idea

I think a for loop in Python always runs exactly 10 times. Am I right?
If not, explain why.

Explain why, not just what

Walk me through setting up a Raspberry Pi web server. For every step,
explain why the step is there.

Checkpoint: two patterns run on something real, and you understand something you did not understand at the start of the period.

Why a confident answer can still be invented

An AI is not looking anything up. It is predicting what text should come next, one piece at a time, from patterns in an enormous pile of writing it was trained on. It is an extremely well read autocomplete.

That is why it writes so well and why it can be so wrong. Sounding right and being right come out of the same machinery, so nothing inside it flags which one just happened. When it does not know something it does not stop, or hesitate, or go quiet. It produces the most plausible looking text available, which is unfortunately what a correct answer also looks like.

This is called a hallucination. It will cite studies that were never published, quote people who never said it, and hand you the street address of a business that has never existed, all in exactly the same tone it uses for things that are true. It is not lying to you. Lying requires knowing the answer.

Three other limits. It has a knowledge cutoff, so it can be confidently out of date about prices, versions and anything that happened recently. It carries the bias of whatever it was trained on. And if you let it answer everything, your own ability quietly stops growing. That last one costs you the most and you will not notice it happening, which is the entire problem.

The fix for all four is the same, and you learned it yesterday. Trace it back to the original.

Step 4: Catch one

Base · everyone

Ask your AI tool something specific and local, where you can check the answer yourself:

The address or opening hours of a specific business on St. Croix
Who currently holds a specific local office
What a particular store charges for something

Then verify it against the real source. Write down what it said, what is actually true, and how you checked.

Stretch · required for HS, bonus for MS

Make it cite something, then chase the citation.

Ask a factual question and add: Cite your sources with links.
Take every citation it gives you and try to open it
For each one, record: does the page exist, does it say what the AI claimed, is it a real source

The most dangerous case is a link that works but does not contain the claim. It looks verified until you actually read it.

Checkpoint: one documented case of the AI being wrong, out of date, or citing something that does not support its claim. If everything checked out, say so and show your checking.

Practice before you go hunting

Six answers with citations. Decide whether each citation actually holds up.

Checkpoint: all six judged. The census one is the pattern to remember, because the link opened perfectly.

Before you leave today

A progress check, not the hand-in. The full submission list is in the Turn in tab.

You know which AI tool you are old enough to use
Screenshot of two prompt patterns you ran, and what you learned
All six citations judged
Your own verification write up: what it said, what is true, how you checked

Base and Stretch

Base · everyone

Three Search Challenge queries with sources, SIFT on one good and one bad source, two prompt patterns run on real work, and one fact checked against the real source.

Stretch · required for HS, bonus for MS

The citation chase. Make the AI cite sources, open every one, and report which exist, which say what it claimed, and which do not. A case where the link works but does not support the claim is the best possible finding.

What you turn in

The whole list. Every item comes out of an activity you already did.

Three Search Challenge queries, the exact text you typed, and the source you landed on. Write "I could not find this" where that is honest.
Two source screenshots, one you trust and one you do not, and which SIFT move exposed the weak one.
Screenshot of two prompt patterns you ran, plus 2 to 3 sentences on what you understand now that you did not before.
Your verification work: a screenshot of your citation score, one sentence on why a working link is not proof, and your own check on something local. High school also submits a citation chase on a question of your own.
Reflection, 3 to 5 sentences: what will you change about how you search or how you use AI?

Tick the boxes as you go. This page remembers them on your own device. The next screen shows exactly how to hand it in.

Handing it in

Two things to hand in, not one

1 · The assignment

Everything on the previous screen goes here, as file uploads.

Open Research and AI in Schoology
Click Submit Assignment
Click Upload
Select all your files at once, then Submit

Do not click "Create". Create is for typing text and will not let you attach a screenshot. Upload is the one you want. This is the single most common way work gets lost.

2 · The exit ticket

A separate item in Schoology, taken in class. It is a short quiz on this lesson, and it is graded on its own.

You can submit the assignment and take the exit ticket in either order, but both have to be done.

Name your files so they make sense. passphrases.png tells Mr. Krigger what he is opening. Screenshot 2026-09-14 at 9.03.11 AM.png does not.

Vocabulary

Term	What it means
Operator	A search command like `site:` or `filetype:` that narrows results instead of adding words
SIFT	Stop, Investigate, Find better coverage, Trace to the original
Primary Source	The original: the study itself, the official data, the person who was there
Secondary Source	Somebody's account of a primary source, like a news article about a study
Hallucination	AI stating something false in exactly the tone it uses for things that are true
Knowledge Cutoff	The date an AI's training stopped. Anything after it, the model is guessing with total confidence.
Bias	A slant an AI inherits from the writing it was trained on
Prompt	What you type to an AI tool
Content Farm	A site that exists to collect ad clicks, with articles as the packaging
Paywall	A page you have to pay to read. A genuine obstacle, and still not a reason to fall back on a worse source

When it goes wrong

My site: search returns nothing.

Drop the https:// and the www., and check the spelling. It should read site:nhc.noaa.gov. The space after the colon breaks it every single time.

I cannot find the Virgin Islands salary number.

Good. That is the honest answer for a lot of territory specific data, and finding out that something is not published is a real result. Write down where you looked.

The AI gave me a source but the link is dead.

Write it down immediately, because that is exactly what this assignment is hunting for. Then search the title on its own and find out whether the source ever existed at all.

I am under 18, so what do I use?

Microsoft Copilot. The school pays for it and the minimum age is 13. If you cannot get in, come find Mr. Krigger rather than quietly borrowing someone's account.

The article I need is behind a paywall.

Check whether your library gives you access, look for the original study the article is describing, or note the paywall and use a different source. Do not pay for anything for this class.

Everything the AI told me checked out.

Then say so, and show your working. Failing to find a mistake is a real result when you genuinely looked for one. It is not a real result when you did not.