TeenTrust-AI: A Structured Educational Framework for Empowering Teenagers to Evaluate Trustworthiness of AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming ubiquitous, so teenagers must learn to engage with it critically, yet most school programs still ignore this need. The paper introduces the Structured Educational Framework for Trustworthy AI, called TeenTrust-AI, to fill this gap. This educational framework helps teenagers evaluate AI tools against seven ALTAI-aligned principles of trustworthiness (privacy, robustness, fairness, transparency, well-being, accountability, and human oversight) through three stages: Teaching, Learning, and Trustworthiness Verification. By using a case study with a climate-change as a reference topic and a chatbot as a AI-powered system, it provides checklist-guided activities to assess trustworthiness. Furthermore, this educational framework is tool/topic-agnostic, and addresses practical adoption challenges to build critical, ethical AI literacy.