Telangana: Reasoning Before the Bot: Telangana Schools Rethink AI in Classrooms

“The tool is not the starting point, the thinking is,” said Pranjali Pathak, co-founder of Pi Jam Foundation, an education non-profit that has worked for nine years largely across government-school systems on problem-solving, creativity, curriculum, teacher training, research and policy. Pathak said Pi Jam had reached more than 18 lakh learners.

The question has acquired fresh relevance after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a one-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI from 2-K through eighth grade. The decision restricts younger students’ access during the 2026-27 school year while allowing limited supervised use and AI literacy at higher grades.

Telangana, Pathak said, had been among the early states to introduce a curriculum combining design thinking, computational thinking, data science and AI literacy. What should an AI lesson look like for a child in Class VI or VII? It may begin without an AI tool at all. A teacher could give children a problem, ask them to spot patterns, question how a system arrives at an answer or discuss where AI can go wrong. Bias and ethics enter the lesson before independent use of a chatbot.

“We strongly believe that putting AI tools in front of children in isolation can do more harm than good,” she said. Pi Jam uses age-appropriate environments such as Code Mitra, where children work through AI concepts using blocks, logic and experimentation. It is also piloting Amazon PartyRock in a closed environment. Its classroom sequence, Socho, Samjho, Banao and Badlo, asks children to think, question, create and then reconsider their work.

Teachers have had to learn that sequence too. Pathak said Pi Jam works closely with the State Council of Educational Research and Training, or SCERT, on teacher capacity around the curriculum. Teachers typically attend four-to-five-day residential bootcamps, followed by district training and school-level support. Some already use AI to prepare lesson plans, activities and teaching material. The harder adjustment comes when a teacher stops supplying the answer immediately and gives students space to experiment and reach it themselves.

That adjustment looks different from one government school to another. Syed Faraz Abdul Karim, a government-school teacher who works with students exposed to AI and digital learning, said, “AI usage among students is definitely increasing, but we are still trying to understand what that use actually looks like in government schools, and children need to be part of that conversation.”

A small Pi Jam survey of 120 government-school students in Classes V to VIII in Mumbai and Pune found that 61 per cent wanted to learn about AI in school and 85 per cent had heard about it through YouTube. Karim said some children knew the term AI but did not recognise recommendation systems as examples. Students also asked whether AI would replace humans, whether people could form emotional relationships with it and what it could not do. Around 61 per cent believed repeated reliance on AI could weaken their thinking.

“Some are becoming more creative in how they teach and use AI, while others are extremely cautious or even averse to it. Both are real responses,” Karim said. Some students, he added, do not have access to mobile phones at home and begin with little understanding of AI.

The private-school experience presents another version of the problem. The Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet, has introduced AI and Robotics as subjects, while its innovation centre allows experimentation, prototyping and problem-solving. Dr Skand Bali, Principal of HPS Begumpet, said students use AI for brainstorming, clarifying concepts, feedback, research and testing ideas.

“We don't want AI to do the thinking for our students; we want it to make their thinking bigger, deeper and more imaginative,” Bali said.

Assessment has become a more immediate concern. What does homework measure when a student can type a prompt and receive a finished response? “Where an assignment can be completed by simply prompting an AI tool, we ask whether it is actually measuring learning,” Bali said. Teachers, he added, should design work where students still have to demonstrate what they understand rather than spend their time policing AI use.

Pathak agreed. “Education cannot become a constant battle between teachers trying to detect whether students have used AI and students trying to hide it,” she said. She believes schools may need more live and project-based assessments where students demonstrate their reasoning.

That also complicates calls for prohibition. Dr Praveen Tammana, assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Hyderabad, argues that schools should distinguish between unrestricted chatbots and software designed for education. “Ban is a subjective word. Which type of AI tools are we banning?” Tammana said.