The About Me card: writing your child's context once
Context engineering means writing down who your child is, once, so an AI stops guessing. Here is what belongs on an About Me card and how five lines change every answer that follows.
A Class 6 boy in one of our sessions had explained, for the third time that afternoon, that he was in Class 6, that he wanted hints instead of answers, and that he did not know the word "photosynthesis" yet. Three different chats, three identical introductions. By the fourth one he stopped and said, annoyed, "why do I have to keep telling it who I am."
He had just independently arrived at the entire reason level 3 exists. Context engineering is nothing more exotic than writing that introduction down once, in a place that gets handed to the AI automatically, every time.
What is context engineering?
If a prompt is the question you ask in this exact moment, context is the standing information that should shape every answer without being retyped - who you are, how you like things explained, and what you are not allowed to be given outright. Prompt engineering is about one message. Context engineering is about every message that follows.
What actually belongs on the card
We ask children to write five short lines, no more, because a card nobody can hold in their head is a card nobody maintains.
- Age and class - so vocabulary and difficulty land in the right place.
- What you are currently working on - the actual chapter, project or exam, not "school stuff".
- How you like answers - hints first, short sentences, no big words you have not met.
- One thing you find hard - so it gets handled with more patience, not less.
- One rule that must never be broken - for a lot of families this is "never just give me the answer".
What changes once it exists
Ask the same volcano question with and without the card, and the difference is immediate. Without it, the answer is generic and pitched at nobody. With it, the answer arrives already adjusted - shorter sentences, a hint instead of a fact, a comparison to something in a Class 6 kitchen rather than a chemistry lab.
The question did not get smarter. The AI just finally knew who was asking.
The habit worth building alongside it
One honest limit: a card this short cannot capture everything about a child, and it should not try to. The next article shows what happens when that same card is turned into rules strict enough to stop an AI doing the homework outright, and the one after that untangles context from a prompt for good.
Questions we get asked
What is context engineering?
It is the practice of writing down standing information about who you are and how you want to be answered - age, current topic, preferred style, hard rules - so it applies automatically to every question that follows, instead of being retyped into every new chat. It is the level-3 companion skill to prompt engineering.
What should be on a child's About Me card for AI?
Five short lines are enough: age and class, what they are currently working on, how they like answers explained, one thing they find hard, and one rule that must never be broken - most commonly, never give the finished answer outright.
How is context different from just asking a good question?
A good question, or prompt, applies to a single message. Context is the background information that should shape every message in a conversation without being repeated - it is written once and rides along, which is why it belongs at the top of a chat rather than inside each question.