› Free · self-paced · for parents & teachers
You can't teach a tool you've never used.
Most adults are trying to supervise a kid's AI use from the outside — from headlines, from other parents, from a district memo. It doesn't work, because every useful judgment about these tools is one you can only make from having been wrong with them yourself.
This is a short sequence to fix that. It is not a course and not a certificate. It's the order we'd put things in if you had a few afternoons.
› Step one · about 15 minutes
Read the argument.
The case for why supervision without personal use is guesswork, and roughly how much of your own honest use it takes before your instincts are worth anything.
› Step two · one afternoon
Do one real thing.
Reading about AI teaches you almost nothing about AI. Building one small, genuinely useful thing — a quiz app, a reading tracker, a class site — teaches you more in an afternoon than a year of articles, because you'll be the one holding it when it breaks. No coding required.
Written for parents and teachers, not developers. Free, no account.
› Step three · while you're forming opinions
Read these, roughly in this order.
Not required, and not a syllabus. These are the pieces that most often change how a grown-up thinks about the question, sequenced so each one has somewhere to land.
- 01
A short glossary for confused parents
Plain-language definitions of the terms your kid keeps saying at dinner — LLM, prompt, model, sensor, and a handful of others, no jargon required.
So the dinner-table vocabulary stops being a bluff.
- 02
AI safety looks different at 8 than it does at 16
Age-appropriate AI use isn't one rule applied uniformly. Here's how supervision and access actually change across our age range, and why.
Age changes the posture, not just the volume. Start here before you write a rule.
- 03
What we mean when we say "build with AI"
The pedagogical spine. Why AI is a force multiplier, not a substitute — and what we teach kids to do about it.
The difference between using AI and building with it — the whole argument in one place.
- 04
The output is the rubric
For parents who measure by score deltas. Why a working thing your kid shipped beats a stack of certificates — and why flat test scores usually aren't what you think.
How to tell whether any of this is working, without waiting on a test score.
- 05
Six things a parent can ask at pickup
"How was it?" gets a shrug. These six questions get an actual answer, and they work whether the session went great or fell apart.
Six questions that get an actual answer instead of a shrug.
- 06
The questions parents ask before enrolling, answered straight
Cost, screen time, supervision, and whether your kid is the right age. The real answers, without the sales voice.
Cost, screen time, supervision, age — answered without the sales voice.
› Step four · the actual point
Then sit down next to your kid.
Everything above exists so this part goes well. Our free course for grades 6–8 covers the same ideas from the kid's side — what AI actually does, how to check it, how to build with it. Doing unit one together is a better conversation than any rule you could write.
Want the next piece when it lands?
Occasional letters on kids, building, and AI — including whatever we add here. A short sequence, not a course, and never a certificate. Unsubscribe in one click.