Notes on teaching AI to children
One series, thirty articles, three for each level of the AI Intermediate Learning Pathway. Written for parents who want to know what their child is actually learning, and what to try at the kitchen table tonight.
Why your child should learn prompt engineering
Prompt engineering is the difference between a child who gets a paragraph out of an AI and one who gets work they can use. Here is why it belongs in a nine-year-old's education, and what it actually teaches.
Level 02 · PROMPTThe same AI gave these two answers, four seconds apart
A side-by-side look at what actually changes in an AI's output when a child rewrites the prompt - length, specificity, structure, and whether the answer is usable at all.
Level 02 · PROMPTSeven things prompt engineering teaches a child that have nothing to do with AI
The lasting benefits of teaching children to write prompts are mostly not technical - they are precision, audience awareness, editing, and the habit of not accepting a first answer.
The whole series
Three articles per level, ten levels, thirty in total. We publish them level by level rather than all at once, because each one is written from what actually happened in a session rather than from a content calendar.
- What an AI actually knows about your child (nothing, and why that matters)
- The goldfish problem: why every chat starts from zero
- Confidently wrong: teaching kids to catch an AI mistake
- The About Me card: writing your child's context once
- How to build an AI tutor that refuses to do the homework
- Context is not decoration - it changes the content
- RAG explained for parents, without the acronym
- Turning your child's own notes into a quiz machine
- Quote it or it did not happen: teaching kids to demand a source
- What is an AI skill, and why should a ten-year-old build one?
- From clever chat to repeatable tool
- The checklist test: how children learn to verify instead of trust
- Connectors, permissions and the word no
- A parent's guide to what an AI should never be allowed to read
- Revoke it: the most important button your child will ever press
- What is an AI agent? Explained with a school bag
- Where should it stop? Teaching children to design approval gates
- Break your own agent: designing for failure at age eleven
- From annoying problem to product plan in one afternoon
- The paper app: why children should test on paper first
- What AI is genuinely great at, and it is not the code
- Five AI house rules worth putting on your fridge
- Prompt injection, explained to a child with one sticky note
- Who is responsible when the AI gets it wrong?
- Word coins: teaching children what an AI answer costs
- Big brain, small brain: choosing the right model for the job
- The repeat bill: why caching exists, explained with arithmetic