Helping Kids Make Sense Of AI

For a curious kid, this could be the most exciting time in history to grow up. A child with an idea for a story, a game, or an invention can see it take shape faster than any generation before, yet most conversations about kids and AI still begin with what they might lose.

Think about the last time you used AI. Maybe you asked a chatbot to help word a tricky email to your child's teacher or had it plan a week of dinners around what was left in the fridge. AI is being built into nearly every industry, and for most adults it has sneakily become part of ordinary life.

AI In Everyday Life

Kids are living in that same world, whether or not they know it yet. Children may interact with AI without realising it when a homework app suggests the next step in a math problem, when an algorithm changes the feed they’re watching, and when they ask the smart speaker in the kitchen a question they once would have brought to a parent. Even children who have never opened a chatbot are surrounded by technology that learns from them and answers accordingly, and integrate with it much earlier than most parents expect.

Learning To Question AI

Elizabeth Tweedale has seen this technology from both sides. Before founding Coco Coders, she co-founded an AI company, where as CTO she helped develop patented AI technology. Tweedale says her company has taught children to code and understand AI through live online classes and games, with programmes for kids ages 6 to 14. In that time, she has watched families wrestle with how much AI their children should be allowed to use, and she believes the most common answer is pointing them in the wrong direction.

Many parents respond to AI the same way they've learned to respond to screens, by setting limits, locking down settings and sometimes banning it from the house altogether. The instinct comes from love, and after years of being told to watch screen time, treating AI as one more thing to ration feels like the responsible choice. Tweedale's concern is that AI is different. It isn't a single app parents can keep their kids away from. It lives inside the search engines, learning platforms and devices children already use at school and at friends' houses, so taking it out of the home rarely keeps it out of their lives.

Coco Coders' approach is more similar to a type of exposure therapy. The company was built on the belief that coding is the foundation of AI literacy, and that children who learn how technology functions are better prepared to use AI responsibly and intelligently. Parents can introduce AI gradually and with support, so it becomes something children understand rather than something mysterious, daunting, all-knowing, or dictating. A ten-year-old who explores a story idea with a chatbot alongside a parent, and then discusses whether the response makes sense, has an opportunity to practice evaluating the tool’s output.

It’s Elizabeth’s mission to illuminate the idea that the kids who get the most out of AI, are the ones who learn early that it's a tool trained on information that can be incomplete or wrong, and designed to predict an answer rather than actually know one. The aim is for children to ask questions, check what AI tells them, make their own judgments and consider when to work through a problem on their own.

Keeping Parents In The Conversation

Schools, she notes, haven't caught up yet. While teachers are doing incredible work, AI literacy is still missing from many classrooms, and plenty of families assume it's being covered somewhere in the school day when it usually isn't. Tweedale believes there is room for schools to give children more practice with the AI skills they may use later in life.

Parents have more influence than they might realize, because the conversations that happen at the dinner table, in the car after pickup, at after-school programs and at summer camps can fill in what the school day doesn't yet cover. Parents can use an AI tool alongside their child and talk through what it gets right and wrong, or turn it into a game by challenging kids to catch the tool making a mistake.

Inside AI Adventurers

That philosophy shaped AI Adventurers, Coco Coders' new six-week AI literacy course, which is now open for enrollment. Designed first for kids ages 10 to 12, it meets for one hour a week in small, live online groups, where students use a kid-safe chatbot to create stories and comics and train their own machine learning model. Each session follows a four-step method that spells out C-O-C-O, Choose a goal, Observe the output, Challenge it, and Own the final work.

"Our aim is for students to leave with the skills to use AI tools safely, confidently and effectively, as we believe this is a core skill they'll need for the future of school, work, and life," Elizabeth says.

Today's children will grow up working alongside AI in ways no one can fully predict, and whether they use it will matter far less than whether they understand it well enough to use it wisely. Parents don't need to have all the answers to help them get there. Parents can start by staying curious and keeping the conversation going.