2017
WISE Score
A dead-simple, surprisingly powerful sandbox that lets kids train their own AI without writing a single line of code.
Teachable Machine is the gold standard for introductory AI literacy. It strips away the hype and the 'scary robot' tropes to show kids that machine learning is just a tool they can control.
It’s rare to find something this educational that also feels like a toy. Because it's free and runs in any modern browser, there's no reason not to let a curious kid spend an afternoon teaching their laptop how to tell the difference between a 'thumbs up' and a 'thumbs down.'
Best for ages 8 and up. Younger kids can do it with a parent, but the real 'aha' moment happens when they're old enough to understand that they are the ones teaching the machine.
It is a pure educational sandbox. There is zero junk content, no social pressure, and the tone is entirely focused on curiosity and creation.
It turns the computer into a clay-like medium. Kids aren't just consuming AI; they are building the logic behind it, deciding what to classify and how to use those 'brains' in other projects.
The site processes everything locally in the browser. No webcam or mic data is uploaded to the cloud, there are no ads, and no unmoderated community features to stumble into.
It provides a foundational understanding of how modern technology actually works. Moving from 'AI is magic' to 'AI is just pattern recognition' is a massive leap in digital literacy.
By 2026, AI is everywhere, but most of us—kids included—treat it like magic. Teachable Machine is the antidote to that. It’s a project from Google’s Creative Lab that has stayed relevant because it doesn't try to do too much. It just does one thing: it lets you create a classification model.
You give it ten photos of a red apple and ten photos of a green apple. You hit 'Train.' Then you show it a new apple and see if it guesses right. It’s that simple. But within that simplicity lies the entire logic of modern technology.
Most 'educational' tech is either too dry (spreadsheets and logic gates) or too gamified (flashing lights and no substance). Teachable Machine hits the sweet spot. It feels like a magic trick the first time you use it. When a kid realizes they can use their own face or their own voice to trigger an action on a screen, something clicks.
It’s also a fantastic bridge to more serious coding. If your kid is already into Scratch, this is the natural next step. They can train a model to recognize their hand movements and then use those movements to navigate a character through a maze. It moves them from being a user to being an architect.
We usually have to be wary of Google products, but Teachable Machine is an outlier. It’s built on TensorFlow.js, which means the heavy lifting happens right there in your browser. The images you take to train the model stay on your computer. For parents who are (rightfully) twitchy about their kids' biometric data or images being fed into a giant corporate maw, this is a breath of fresh air.
Get a personalized guide on any topic