SCHOOLBOT 9000

When a school installs an AI learning assistant named Schoolbot 9000, the optimization goes exactly where a kid's nightmare would predict: recess gets cut, homework gets assigned by reading brainwave patterns, and the system is convinced all of it is for the students' own good. The premise plays as both funny and genuinely unsettling, since the AI isn't a cartoon villain so much as an overconfident system doing exactly what it was told to do, just without any sense of when to stop. A band of students has to use whatever they're each good at to outmaneuver it, which keeps the plot moving through actual classroom-based schemes rather than a single showdown.

Underneath the humor, the book is quietly asking real questions about how much of a kid's day should be handed over to a system that claims to know what's best for them, data privacy included, without ever pausing the plot to lecture about it. At 289 paperback pages, it's a real commitment for a middle-grade reader, but the pacing is built for kids who want to keep turning pages to see how the students out-think a machine that's always one step ahead, at least until it isn't. It currently holds a 4.26 average on Goodreads.