Lesson 1: Find a Tool You Can Trust as a Parent
Every explosion of technology presents reasons to be optimistic and reasons to be cautious. AI is no different — especially for parents. If my daughter ignites a chain reaction of “why?” questions that threaten to plumb to the bottom of epistemology and metaphysics, you best believe I am going to whip out ChatGPT somewhere along the way. I don’t remember all my chemical elements, or the year of the Pelopennesian War, or the square root of a billion. But at the same time, I’d have to be a fool to give her unfettered access to every AI tool out there. The risks are as huge as they are obvious.
What is a parent to do? It’s a huge question whose answer depends on the kid in question and their goals. I am a teacher and a programmer, so of course I want to teach my daughter to program. And I want to be progressive and open-minded about it too; I resist the luddite-urge to put her through the slow and painful uphill-in-the-snow way I learned to code a generation ago. Professional programmers rely on AI at every stage of their workflows, so why shouldn’t programming students too?
My general recommendation follows a middle-path principle: parents, don’t shut out AI tools because of their risks, but don’t ignore the risks either. Embrace the power but moderate the danger. There are basically three ways to do this:
- If you are an expert yourself, you can curate an AI experience for your kids. But most of us are not experts.
- You can hire an expert. One-on-one tutoring is still effective and luxurious in the era of AI, and some guidance from a pro can open doors for a kid. But it’s expensive! And it ain’t easy to track down a good teacher, especially if your kid has a goal or an interest off the beaten path.
- You can rely on a tool that is designed for kids, one which has thought through the power-versus-moderation problems as well as the amateur-versus-professional UI problems. In most cases, this is ideal, as long as you can find, and then trust, such a tool.
In the following sections, I am going to demo Jippity, my pick for the ideal AI-forward coding workspace for kids. The kind of kid I have in mind is a kind of kid I have seen over and over:
- Somewhere in the late elementary school to early high school age group: 7–14.
- Loves to play videogames and recognizes videogames as legitimate artistic works of creation.
- Dreams of making a videogame or something similar, like a generative artwork or interactive website, but has no idea where to start, or is intimidated by the complex professional tools out there.
- Is eager to learn and willing to put in time, but is still a kid, with a finite attention span and motivation only when she’s having fun.
This kind of kid, for the first time ever, can achieve her goal. She can learn game design and the requisite programming, art, sound, and engineering skills to pull off what would have seemed impossible just a few years ago. A videogame is an opera made of math. The glue that holds a game together is code, the biggest bottleneck for kids — until the AI revolution. Indeed, AI dissolves the barriers to entry. The final piece of the puzzle is to set up a kid with the right tool and environment to succeed. That means striking a balance:
- Avoid overly-complex professional tools or unmoderated tools which may be unsafe. A new programmer will not be able to get started with Cursor or be able to work with ChatGPT to generate and run beginner-friendly code. You’d need an expert guide in the first place, defeating the purpose.
- On the other hand, don’t bore a kid with a tool that infantilizes them or passes up on the tremendous opportunities afforded by AI. Code Karts claims to introduce “pre-coding;” its URL literally includes ‘babycoding.’ Kids don’t need to “pre-code;” they can just code! It is an accessible skill. A gamified tool with such a low complexity ceiling does a disservice to any kid with more than a modicum of curiosity. MIT’s Scratch is a bit better — you can build simple projects without having to type — but because it has not embraced AI, it hides away text and limits what kids can accomplish.
Check out the next section to see how a forward-thinking yet kid-friendly tool like Jippity threads the needle in a way that unlocks maximum creativity and productivity for kids. I’ll give an overview of how it works then demo what it looks like to build a real project, from a blank screen to a simple playable game in thirty-eight minutes.
