The past couple summers, I taught at a summer camp, helping kids build fun things with AI. I ended up learning a lot from two kids in particular about how AI fits into learning. Details are altered a bit to anonymize students.
We had just walked everyone through an activity to come up with ideas for businesses they would like to start. Then I told them to add more of their own ideas to their online journal. The journal was part of the custom software we built for the summer camp, and it even included an “AI with guardrails” designed to help students who were stuck, but not do the work for them. As they typed in their journals, I walked around the room. Coming around to one seventh-grader’s desk, I saw he had switched tabs from our custom-AI-with-guardrails to plain ChatGPT and had told it to write the whole business plan for one of his ideas. Then, realizing the output was too fluent, he added a second prompt: “No this sounds too smart. You have to make it sound like a kid wrote it.”
Another day, I was working with one of the younger kids. This kid wanted a cool logo for her product, but her drawing skills didn’t live up to her imagination. She had even rejected a few AI attempts. She just wanted HER logo, but drawn better. She gave the AI a hand-drawn version and it gave her back an image with no coloring outside the lines. Her creative vision, executed with steadier hands. She was beaming.
Both kids used AI, but with different of intent. One of them worked hard to manage my impression of the output, the other worked hard to meet her own standards. This wasn’t a difference between the kids, it was a difference in how meaningful the work was to them.
Lots of folks, including me in an earlier piece, have been skeptical of AI use while learning, because it makes cognitive offloading attractive. That’s true. But here is the other side of the coin: seeing work just beyond your capabilities can be inspiring, too. I know, because I’ve felt it. I remember copy-pasting code I didn’t understand in some of my hobby projects – that was the 2010s-equivalent of vibe coding with AI. It allowed me to get the project working. Of course, I had to go back later on to learn how that worked, often when I hit the next wall. But feeling like you’re making progress is important too. AI used with ownership can be the difference between excitedly finishing a project, and giving up and deciding that “I’m not a _____ person.”
I’m grateful for what I learned from these kids over the summer. Kids really do care about the work when they feel ownership of it.