🧠 Learn how AI works · 💻 Coding
RAISE Playground
By MIT RAISE Initiative and the MIT Media Lab Personal Robots Group. Visit RAISE Playground
Desk research from the maker's own pages. Not yet tried by us. Checked 2026-10-24.
RAISE Playground is a free, browser-based block coding tool from MIT for making projects with AI. Students snap blocks together to train image or text classifiers, recognize gestures, generate music, try reinforcement learning and program robots. It comes with free middle school curricula, including Responsible AI for Computational Action, Dancing with AI and How to Train Your Robot, which mix building with discussions about ethics. Projects save to the student's computer or a personal cloud drive.
Our take: An excellent free way for middle schoolers and teachers to learn how AI works by building it; younger children will need a lot of adult help.
Checked in a browser
A browser check on 2026-10-25: what loads, the ads and trackers we saw, and what a child meets first. Not a hands-on test.
| Child safety: 5 out of 5 | No ads, chat or sign-up prompts; the only links out are Creative Commons and the site builder. |
|---|---|
| Data: 5 out of 5 | No third-party ad, tracking or analytics networks; only Google Fonts loaded. |
| Ease: 4 out of 5 | Clear 'Open Playground' and 'Open Example' buttons; the text is aimed at middle schoolers and assumes some reading. |
| Cost honesty: 5 out of 5 | Free; no upsell seen. |
What we found
- 2 third-party sites contacted (Google Fonts); no analytics or ad hosts
- 0 cookies set
- No ad frames and no asks to sign up, log in, chat or buy
- The first screen explains the block-based AI tools and lists the curricula with big buttons
From the test: A clean, free MIT site with no ads or trackers seen; best for middle schoolers who can read the instructions.
| Ages it suits | middle school (about 11-14), usable by older students |
|---|---|
| What its terms say about age | Not stated in terms. The terms say no account or personal information is needed to use the site. (terms) |
| Price | Free. Free (Oct 2026); materials licensed CC BY-NC. |
| Works on | Web |
| Account | No account needed |
| Ads | None |
| In-app purchases | None |
| The AI in it | Students build and train their own simple machine-learning models and use AI engines inside block projects. |
What's good
- Free with no account or tracking
- Hands-on look at how AI is trained
- Ready-made middle school curricula
- Ethics built into lessons
Watch for
- Research tool; MIT promises no uptime
- Projects are lost unless saved
- Best with a teacher guiding
Data and privacy
MIT's terms say the site collects no information about users, does not track use, log IP addresses or set cookies, and stores no projects on MIT servers. Saving to Google Drive or similar is governed by that service's own policy. Read the privacy policy.
Does it work?
The curricula come from MIT research groups, who publish on their own work; no independent study of the Playground was found.
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Where these facts come from
- https://playground.raise.mit.edu/
- https://playground.raise.mit.edu/Landing%20Page/Terms-of-Service.html
Prices, terms and features change. Nobody paid to be listed, nothing here is an affiliate link, and Peabody never rates itself. Where we and the maker disagree, the maker's own pages are the ones to trust.