EP 304: Preparing Today's Kids for the AI Future

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Do you know how today's kids, we kind of call them the smartphone generation, right, Always heads down, never really able, I think to converse in a way that older adults do. But they were raised on smartphones. But in the future, should we be worried about them using too much AI and what are the actual skills that they should be learning now to prepare to live in a future full of AI? All right, we're going to be talking about that today and more on Everyday AI. This is your daily live stream podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people learn and leverage generative AI to grow their companies and to grow their careers. So if that sounds like you, thank you for joining us. We do this, like I said, every day, so make sure to go to your everydayai.com Sign up for the free daily newsletter there. You can also go back and read and listen to more than 300 episodes where we've covered just about everything you can think of when it comes to generative AI. All right, before we get into today's discussion, we're going to start though, as we do every day, by going over the AI news. So the Japanese company Softbank is going all in on AI. So SoftBank Corp. Raised $1.8 billion through bond sales to expand investment in artificial intelligence, making it one of the biggest foreign currency deals by a Japanese company this year. So SoftBank's bond offering indicates a growing trend of Japanese companies increasing overseas debt deals to focus on AI. And these funds will be used to retire debt and fund operations, highlighting SoftBank's commitment to AI investment. So really worth keeping an eye on what SoftBank is investing in. But it looks like the Japanese company is trying to make a huge splash here in the US With AI investments. All right, next. Well, actually next and last, we have two separate ChatGPT stories. Well, OpenAI has released a new model meant to critique its own model and also signed a huge partnership with a legacy media company. So OpenAI researchers have developed Kritik GPT, a new AI model that helps identify flaws in code generated by ChatGPT and other models, ultimately improving the process of making AI systems behave as desired. So critic GPT. Yeah, it's kind of. They created a model to police its own model and make it better, but it uses reinforcement learning from Human feedback, or RLHF, to assist human reviewers in catching errors in responses generated by their chatgpt model. So this model has shown promising results so far in identifying both internal and natural errors. You know, better spotting hallucinations than just humans alone or just the Critic GPT alone. So, you know, all the benchmarks are showing. Obviously the combination of critic GPT and human working together does the best in, you know, having a better output with fewer hallucinations. Also, what we said there. Time magazine and OpenAI have formed a huge multi year partnership to make Times archives and current content exceeding accessible to chat GPT and OpenAI. So the deal helps expand access to trusted information and follows similar partnerships other media companies have made with OpenAI, such as the Financial Times, such as Axel Springer, you know, Associated Press, etc. So we'll have those stories and a lot more in our newsletter. So make sure to go to your everydayai.com and sign up for that free daily newsletter. All right, but we're back, we're back live. Yeah, we had a couple, couple glitches today, but that's all right. We're here though, to talk about how we can prepare kids for the AI future. This is something I honestly think about a lot. I don't talk about it a ton on the show though, so that's why I am very excited for today's guest so we can talk about it together. So please help me in welcoming to the show David Dodge, the founder and CEO of Coda Kid. David, thank you for joining us and.

I'm thrilled to be here.

All right, absolutely. So David, well, first of all, joining us, you know, 5, 5:30am local time, so thanks for that. But tell us a little bit about CodaKid and what you all do.

CodaKid is, is a kids coding and AI academy that's based here in, in Phoenix, Arizona. So we teach kids ages 6 to 16 how to code, how to build things with AI, how to build websites, games, apps. We've been doing it since 2014 and basically we taught over 100,000 students over the last 10 years.

Wow, that's pretty amazing. And I think a very important skill set for kids to learn early on. I'm curious, David, maybe just anecdotally when AI splashed onto the scene. I mean, obviously AI has been around for a very long time, long time. But I think for the most part, the general public got its first taste of it in November 2022 with Chat GBT. You know, how did you all and, and Kodakid kind of view this? Right, because coding is obviously thought of a very technical, you know, very technical skill set and a great thing. I think to teach kids early on, but then here you come with AI, you know, almost out of nowhere. You know, what was your initial response, you know, from a coda kid perspective?

I mean, you know, when, when the CEO of Nvidia comes on and basically says, you know, hey, maybe we're not going to need to teach coding anymore, you know, we, that got our attention for sure. But yeah, we also though, we, we consider ourselves an academy that, that teaches kids emerging technology. And so from the get go, we've done that. When new things are introduced, we, we teach it. We, we believe that learning, you know, teaching kids how to learn new technologies is one of the most important skills for the future. For sure. Kind of getting into what we're going to talk about later. But, but yeah, coding for sure is, we still believe that it's very important. Yes, it's changing. AI is, you know, going to become code partners. It's going to help people build things much faster, much better. That said, if you do not have a background in computational thinking and understand the rudiments of coding, I think it's going to be much harder for you to build things. And we still see it as a foundational skill.

Yeah, I mean, let's talk about that. Right? Not quite the elephant in the room because it's something we've talked about a lot, but I'm glad you brought it up. Yeah, I think Nvidia CEO Jensen Wong kind of grabbed headlines a couple of months ago when, you know, someone asked him, hey, about the future and he said, hey, I don't think, you know, kids should be taught coding. And he also kind of said that it wasn't going to be as important of a skill set in the future as all of these other systems. Get smarter. David, what's your overall take on that? Right, like, not asking you, oh, is he wrong or right or to predict the future, but, you know, as someone that runs, you know, a coding academy for, you know, thousands of kids, how did you all respond to that news and you know, how do you think about the future of AI and coding coexisting?

Yeah, I mean, we, again, as I mentioned earlier, we still think coding is extremely important. You know, having an understanding, a foundational understanding of loops and variables and conditionals and whatnot. I think is Boolean logic absolutely mission critical in understanding and being able to use the tools of the future. We also look at coding is such a fantastic way when building games and apps. It teaches kids iterative design and where you actually build something, you then take it to someone have them test it. They say, oh, this sucks. Oh, I love this. You, you tweak it, you iterate, you, you then, you know, you know, complete that, that loop and basically keep it going like that. That is a foundational skill in tomorrow's world. In today's world, actually. Schools aren't getting it done, you know, at all in that terrain. And, and we think that computer programming is, is one fantastic way to do that.

Yeah, and let's, let's get into that. And you know, if you are just joining us a little bit live here, you know, we have David Dodge, the founder and CEO of Coda Kid, talking about just the future of, you know, kids, how they should be using AI, how they shouldn't be. Right. I'm curious and this is something David, I think about a lot.

Right.

So I kind of started the show talking about, you know, kind of the smartphone generation of kids. And you know, is it great that they can, you know, whiz around on a smartphone? Absolutely. Are there downsides? Probably right. Their, their ability to know, maybe interact with other, you know, adults is, is something I think about. Are there downsides to, you know, kids being, you know, too AI literate at too young of an age? I mean, what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean, we were talking about this earlier, Jordan. There's a school of thought in education where people are like, look, they're going to be using AI to write, you know, blogs and whatnot. Like let them plagiarize now, you know, and, and this is, this is the future. And I'm a little older school, I feel that kids brains are developing and in order to develop critical thinking and creativity and ingenuity, I think that you have to think through when writing a paper. Maybe you can use AI to help you frame and do research, but actually using it to connect thoughts and ideas and whatnot, I think can be a disservice. I think that as you get older, perhaps not so much, but there's certainly a foundational time, particularly in K8, where I believe kids need, you know, need to develop those skills on their own.

You know, speaking of developing skills, I'd say this even for adults, right? Like not just coding, but AI in general. I was actually having a conversation with someone about this last night about how a lot of people mid career might have to make a hard pivot and really, you know, kind of go all in on AI, you know, for kids. Right. You know, kids, you know, I think maybe 10 or 15 years ago, if a kid was learning coding, I think you could be like, oh wow, you know, this kid is going to have a solid future. They're a great coder. David, what are those skills? Maybe now, right, that, that we look at kids in elementary school, grammar school, et cetera. What are those other skills, right, aside from coding, aside from AI, what are those other types of skills that they should be learning to kind of survive and thrive in an AI future?

Yeah, sure. I mean the general skills almost sound like things you would learn in a liberal arts environment. You know, I mean again, creativity, ingenuity, those are always in short supply, you hear. You know, companies just constantly looking for that problem solving, again, I don't know how else to phrase it, but value creation, that is something that is not taught in schools. It drives me nuts that it's not. And maybe in business, business oriented classes in high school, you'll start to see that. But that, that notion of, of, of learning about a gap in the market, a need, a pain point, something that, you know, would allow you to come up with an idea or a product or a service and actually fulfill that and then again, try it out, test it, get feedback, change it, tweak it, make it better. I mean those are, those are skills that aren't going away and that I think are again, mission critical. We can go into specifics on, on what I think are some AI related skills, like things that they can be doing now. But again, as you, as you know, I mean, we have no idea really how, how things are going to look in 10 years, right?

Yeah, it's hard enough. Like 10 months, I feel weeks. Right. But yeah, maybe David, let's go into what are some of those more AI related skills? Right? So maybe there's a parent out there and they're, you know, maybe worried about their kids or they really want to make sure that their kids are learning the right skills that kind of help prepare them for their future. So maybe what some of those more AI technical related skills. Because I love what you said about, you know, kind of these, you know, creativity, ingenuity, problem solving, that's great. But maybe when we talk about, you know, AI related skills or technical skills, where should kids be focusing kind of their time and energy to learning these things?

Yeah, sure. You know, you and I were talking earlier about the schools and what the schools are basically doing right now. They are starting to. I just got back from ISTE in Denver and which is a big ed tech conference and the schools are starting to use tools like Magic school and Flint K12 and Merlin mind and things like that, but basically what I'm seeing the schools doing is effectively using AI for personalized tutoring. In other words, they're taking their existing curricula and just making it more personalized and adaptive for students. It's, which is a great thing. I mean, it's, it's a really good thing. But, you know, we at Coda Kid, we take things a little bit further. We're going and doing some things that maybe the schools can't quite do right now. Again, we, we do start by teaching AI ethics. And it's mission critical, I think, you know, especially for, for kids to understand, you know, where we're going with that. We, we teach prompt engineering. And by the way, shout out to, to you, Jordan, your PPP course is fantastic. Anybody who's listening to this that has not taken it, do yourself a favor, sign up. It's fantastic. But yeah, so, so we actually teach kind of a PPP style framework that's kind of kidified, if you will, and, you know, other skills that we're, you know, we're getting into. Obviously we teach coding and we teach now modern software development, so using AI as a code partner. So we have courses that we're delivering right now and online camps that we've been doing all summer that are enormously popular on building websites with REACT and AI building apps. We were huge fans of the Roblox platform. And Roblox is really taking the lead in AI and has basically put a model in their game creation engine. And so we're creating custom art and we're using its code helper to help create games twice as fast. Our kids are monetizing their games on Roblox Marketplace. It's like, back in my day, it was like, yeah, let's start a lemonade stand. It's like, these kids know, man, it's awesome. So other things that we were into are, you know, we're starting to work with APIs and local models. So we're, we're creating GPT assistants and GPT agents, and we're finding that that's really interesting. Again, kids are not going to be interested in agents to help you with your marketing. They're interested. For example, like, one cool idea that we're working with right now is to create like a movie media game, like game Recommendation Assistant. So you train it on what they like and don't like, and it basically gives them better recommendations. And then we're building an agent that, you know, fetches the most recent premieres in streaming platforms and then serves up these personalized recommendations to them, like, you know, cool things like that. So it's again, we're, we're looking at the kids learning and really diving in to, to the tech going beyond where schools are able to go right now. And those are the kinds of skills that we think are going to be important in tomorrow's world.

Yeah, David, it's, it's funny you bring up, you know, kids, you know, now monetizing on Roblox and yeah, we used to do lemonade stands, right. Like I was chuckling, you know, I was chuckling at that because that's what I did, you know, growing up. And me too, I was, I was a little dorkier. I actually used to ab test, right, As a kid, like lemonade stand. I would write down, oh, if I go on this corner, this day, this sign, right? But it's, it's kind of interesting now. So even talking about kids in coding, right, I've worked with at risk youth for 10 years and we did a lot of technology programs, STEM and I remember a summer program we did and it was like the entire summer. And the end goal is if they could code one thing, right? It was a great success. How, how can you even keep up now? Right? Because if we talk about, you know, recent, you know, LLM developments, we have anthropics, you know, 3.5 sonnet, where you know, you can code and it renders the code in there in like, yeah, 10 seconds, right? You can create literally a working game, a working website, a working dashboard in seconds with, with natural language. How, you know, with advancements like this coming so quickly and seemingly carry so much power, what's the best way for, for youth to keep up and put this into practice when the capabilities are changing so quickly?

Wow, good question. Again, what we're finding right now is that AI is not capable of building full stack applications without some pretty major problems. The other thing that we're finding is that when you have a small group of kids and they're all basically working with an instructor to build a certain type of project, you know, the, the LLM is, is actually, you know, producing differing outputs for, for the different kids and, and oftentimes there are a lot of errors and other problems. So it's, it's not perfect right now. It's getting better. If the kids don't have, if they haven't taken our, say, Python basics, they are not able to, you know, oftentimes to diagnose they'll, they'll ask the LM to diagnose the issues but oftentimes, I mean, it produced it. It has no. It thinks it's right. It will actually argue with you that it's correct. And meanwhile, you're not getting the output that you're looking for. Like something isn't working well in your game. So right now, that's where we are right now, Jordan. And I'm sure you've heard that from other developers. But moving forward, again, I don't know what it will look like in 10 years. I do think that as, you know, as it develops, it's going to get easier and easier. I think that the LLMs are going to become commodities. I think that people are going to be developing applications for particular niches. Subject matter expertise is going to be extremely important. There's going to be a lot of value in that and we'll just have to see, you know, where things are. I still think a technical background, at least a foundation is mission critical. And I believe it will be in the future as well.

Yeah. And you know, speaking of background, you know, I feel, I even think about when I was growing up, right. Like I was able to have access in schools, you know, typing programs, you know, running computer programs. I know that sounds weird, but, you know, you know, in the 90s that was like, you know, huge. You know, you could learn typing in, in grammar school. Right. What's, what's your thoughts right now? Because I feel AI is still in, in the US educational system at least. It's very polarizing. Right. I think there are certain number of, of schools and, and you know, primary education, secondary education institutions that go all in on AI. Right. And they essentially, you know, do a lot of the work that is probably similar to what you would be doing at Coda Kid.

Right.

And then there's other schools that still completely ban it. Right. You can't touch it, they don't teach it, they don't talk about it. Like, what's your take on right now how AI and AI related skills are or aren't being taught in the actual classroom?

Yeah. Great. Again, you had a guest on a couple of months ago Believe in a British fellow, was really great episode and he works with schools to help implement AI. We've started to consult with some schools here in Arizona on putting things together. We are definitely seeing a lot of concern. Obviously there's a lot of resistance. They're very concerned about plagiarism. They're concerned about, again, like what we talked about earlier, where there are many teachers that believe that the AI will be doing the thinking for the Kids and not developing those, you know, some of those critical thinking skills that are so important. We have other schools that are jumping head on into AI. One thing that we, we are seeing for sure, as we all know, teacher attrition is a huge issue. Burnout, super long hours. Teachers are using AI and it is really changing their lives. I'm hearing that again and again and again. It's, you know, they're creating so much more free time for themselves. And so that's kind of how, what's been happening. The teachers are actually signing up for a lot of these, these programs like, like school and whatnot. And then they're going to their, to their administrators and saying, hey, this is really cool. This is saving me like eight hours a week on mundane tasks. And they've got the student module. Can we try this? And so that's, that's kind of where things are right now with a lot of schools. So Magic School, for example, I think they're up to like 2 million teachers are using their platform, which is pretty cool adoption I think worldwide there's like 100 million teachers, so it's still like, you know, tiny fraction of available teachers. But we're starting to see some adoption there.

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I have a hot take, so normally I don't just insert my own hot takes in here, David, but I'd love to just get your response to this.

Sure.

I think that there's such an under misunderstanding of AI and in large language models in general in the us you know, Then we think we, you know, we talk about things like AI content detectors, you know, which, which don't work, FYI. And you know, kids are getting in trouble for, you know, papers that they say they wrote and, you know, these things say, say, oh, no, you didn't write it. It's, it's AI. I don't think there's ever been a time, at least that I can see of that the US Educational system has been so far behind of where we need to be. Because right now, these are essential skills. Right when, when kids are coming out of college, you know, employers want AI literacy. And for the last, you know, three, you know, three, four years since GPT technology has been available, schools have, A lot of schools are still blanket, blanket banning it. Is that a big problem? Am I over, you know, am I blowing this out of proportion? And if, if that is how it is today, what should parents, what should kids be doing about this kind of, this conundrum of, you know, hey, our schools are not teaching us some of the most important skills.

Yeah, it is a, it is a problem. I sympathize with them. I understand where they're coming from. Schools are notoriously slow at develop, at adopting things. It took them forever to even create computer science standards and to start adopting that, I mean, that took like decades for them to finally get around to that. And then now they're finally doing that and then suddenly AI, generative AI comes in and just throws them for a loop and now they're like, oh my gosh. So, yeah, you're right. They, they have to do more. And, and I believe that again, it will take time. It's going to take some, it's going to take industry to, to raise the, you know, the alarm and just say, hey, we, we need these skills. Colleges are going to have to step in and do things. The kids are, are already learning things on their own. But there's so, there's so much depth and breadth. If we're going to truly innovate and master AI augmentation, we're going to have to teach these skills starting at a young age. So, yeah, I think for parents that are looking, you know, to give their kids these foundational skills, there are a number of resources you can find online. There are a number of companies you can Google AI courses for kids, AI camps for kids. There's a number of academies out there, like codakid obviously does that. There's AI camp, there's ID Tech, there's, there's a lot of really good solid institutes out There where you can supplement your child's education.

Yeah. And it's, I don't know, just to me it's, it's, it's a sad state. Right. Like, I feel really bad, right. For kids maybe now that are in high school and you know, they haven't been able to use and to leverage this technology. But you know, I'm curious because, you know, David, you said that you're, you're a parent yourself. You know, how would you want.

Right.

And I'm sure that, you know, your, you know, kids that you have are probably much better off, you know, given that their, you know, dad is the founder of a, you know, coding academy that teaches AI as well. But, you know, if your child was not getting basic AI education in the classroom, what would you do? And how should parents, parents, you know, be responding in these instances?

I mean, you can certainly talk to your school and encourage them, you know, to, to adopt things. At a, at a bare minimum, you could talk to the school. If you're in a district that has after school programs, there are often vendors, there are nonprofits that, that can come in and actually deliver after school programs. If you don't have time, you know, perhaps during, during the day or you, you don't have, you know, kind of the buy in from administration on that, that's one, one, you know, thing that you could do, you could talk to the PTA and do that again. There's, right now there are a number of academies that are starting to do this both with in person classes in your cities or towns or there's some excellent online options that are available and that's what we do with our daughter. We actually use a variety of different academies and institutes and we certainly use Coda kit as well. But yeah, she's been doing AI camps all summer, two hours a day. So we keep it at that sort of time frame. And she's been creating just some amazing stuff. She's 11 and we do a parent presentation on Friday. It's mind blowing what these kids are creating in 10 hours in a week long camp.

Yeah. And I kind of want to hit rewind because I actually forgot to ask you something earlier. Right. So when kids or anyone right now has the ability to even use off the shelf AI models and you know, especially over the last couple of weeks, they've actually gotten a lot better, you know, at coding and being able to create code that's, that's, you know, usable and it works a lot of times out of the box and being able to render it you know, within seconds, what does this change for what's possible? Right? Like, I kind of think now how, you know, there's this phase where, you know, all kids are on social media and they all want to be, you know, content creators or YouTube, etc. Might we see a show shift where now all of a sudden, you know, kids at, you know, 8, 9, 10, 11, like you said, oh, monetizing on Roblox. Is it going to be standard for, you know, kids maybe to be the one leading the charge in the future? You know, creating, you know, new, new products, new software, new businesses at such a young age with coding and AI.

It's so cool you're bringing that up. One of the modules in, in a course that we're putting together. We're putting together a really, really cool course course we're releasing this fall and we don't have a title for it quite yet, but it's basically the idea is the one course that every kid should take to thrive in the AI future. Okay. And one of the modules is kidpreneurship. And so how to use lms basically to brainstorm as a brainstorm partner for business ideas, putting together business plans, financials, pnl, projections, you know, going, going through, doing competitive analysis, understanding, like, you know, what, what, you know, opportunities there are in the market. So, yes, I, I love kidpreneurship. We try to encourage it here at our home and I would love to see that. You're absolutely right. Like, it was really, really hard in the past for a kid, for example, to create an app at age 11 or 12. And now I think that, that we're getting close to a point where that is entirely possible, where a kid could come up with a really cool app. It might be really small, it might be niche, it might be designed specifically for their, like, 11 to 13 age group, but it's going to be entirely possible for these kids to create, create these things in literally a matter of days, maybe even hours, and put them up live and again, get other kids to start using them and maybe there'll be a way for them to monetize. Super exciting time.

Wow. It is exciting, right? It's exciting. Yet at the same time, there's challenges. There's challenges for the right path forward with ethically responsibly teaching AI to kids when sometimes they can't get it in the school. So, you know, David, like, as, as we wrap up here, because we've gone over a lot, right, we've talked about how coding is still, you know, mission critical about how some of the most important skills might be things like creativity and ingenuity and problem solving and, you know, how parents might have to supplement AI education at home, at least for now. So, you know, what is kind of your one kind of takeaway or your one most important piece of advice that you want people to understand on how we can properly prepare today's kids for an AI future?

Yeah, I guess it's the, you know, the genie is out of the bottle. AI is here and it is, it is not going away. It's something that, you know, that we all need to embrace and it is going to completely transform industries, how we work. It's going to be, it's going to, to me, it's one of the most exciting times that we've had in centuries. And I think that teaching AI early is really, really important. I think that these skills are mission critical. And we've seen it even like you're in my generation, Jordan. We were kind of coming in right as the Internet was, was, was was coming out in the 90s and I noticed the next generation, you know, the kids that kind of came out of college in the early 2000s and whatnot, seem to have this in more innate ability with technology than, than our generation did. The same thing is going to be needed and necessary for kids today. They're going to need exposure and these skills in order to compete in tomorrow's world. So yeah, embracing this, not being afraid of it, you know, and, and realizing that it has tremendous potential to do very, very positive things for, you know, for your kids development, that would be my, my big takeaway.

Wow, so many great pieces of advice there and I, I think that this is a conversation we need and so David, you know, I really appreciate you coming on the Everyday AI show to share and help us all hopefully prepare today's kids for more secure and better AI future. So thank you so much for your time to come on the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

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