I’m excited to introduce Make with Miko, a pilot program I built this summer to introduce foundational AI concepts to K-5 learners. This program is designed to help elementary aged learners who are growing up in the AI Age develop an early vocabulary and mental model for both understanding and building with AI. Here’s what it looks like today, and how I’d like it to evolve from here.

Over the past year, I’ve become increasingly fluent in building AI tools, frameworks, and applications for myself and for others. What’s made this journey even more rewarding has been the chance to teach while building, applying what I’ve learned in communities that don’t always get access to this information firsthand.

This past year, I’ve experimented with bringing AI to unexpected places: into my local block association, where I’ve taught retirees how to build with AI; into schools, partnering with elementary and high school students to co-create alongside me as I iterate on my own app, MuseKat.

Along the way, I’ve continued to have interesting and thought-provoking conversations with my own kids (aged 3 and 5) about the role that AI plays in our lives, how to trust (or not!) these “learning robots” and even experiment with parental-guided co-play. I wondered: Is there a safe, facilitated way to introduce some of these foundational concepts at a young age?

That’s why I was so excited to have the opportunity to partner with to Dan Steinberg at Harlem Link Charter School this summer. I’m so appreciative of their willingness to invite me into their classroom of 8- and 9-year-olds to pilot this four-week program.

One of the biggest insights I’ve had from my own AI journey is this: Learning AI is less like using a calculator and more like learning a new language. And like any language, it requires literacy, fluency, and practical application.

As I’ve been building AI applications, I’ve found myself returning to a handful of core skills again and again, skills I now believe are essential for the AI age. They are:

1. Critical thinking

2. Communication

3. Creativity

4. Systems thinking

5. Personal agency

This summer’s pilot was a test: Could we introduce the building blocks of AI while reinforcing those foundational skills?

With Harlem Link’s support, we built a series of weekly lessons around mini-apps that encouraged kids to not just use AI, but to build with it.

Our protagonist was Miko the Meerkat (yes, the same character I use in MuseKat). In Week 1, Miko helped us explore the idea that “learning robots” (our shorthand for explaining LLMs to kids) can sometimes be confident but wrong. Students played a game called Miko, That’s Not Right! where Miko would describe objects around the room with intentionally flawed AI-generated captions.

For example: A picture of yellow pencils might be described by Miko as “red pencils. It was up to the students to shout, “Miko, that’s not right!”

This sparked immediate engagement and set the stage for discussions around critical thinking and error-spotting in AI systems.

In Week 2, we tackled systems thinking and communication with a game called Guess the Rule. Students created sorting rules based on physical objects and then took pictures of items that matched those rules. Miko then had to guess what the rule was.

For example: A student might sort objects by color (say, red) and include a red ball, a red pencil, and a red pom-pom, but throw in a green crayon as the “exception.” Miko would guess the rule, and students would critique or correct Miko’s logic.

This helped them understand how AI is trained, and how important clear input and feedback are in building better systems.

This week was all about creativity and agency. We encouraged students to design their own “learning robots.” Each student drew a character on paper and worked in groups to give their robot personality traits and backstories.

From “Snowflake the Princess” to “Sigma Monster the Water Monster,” the characters were imaginative, hilarious, and deeply personal. We selected a few of these to develop further, adding detail like where the robot lives, who its friends are, and what it’s curious to learn about.

In our final week, we gave students’ characters a digital life. We used AI-generated audio to bring their voices to life and developed simple personas to guide how the characters spoke and behaved. Students then listened as their own creations told stories about objects in the classroom.

This full-circle moment of drawing a character, building a backstory, programming it with a voice, and then hearing it speak was profoundly empowering for the kids. It made AI feel tangible, personal, and of course, buildable.

I had so much fun making these apps and building this pilot in real-time with young learners this summer. Not only were did the students engage as users, but as builders and even critics. They can spot mistakes, teach machines, and design tools that reflect their unique perspectives. I believe these concepts will become important foundational structures for anyone growing up in the so-called AI Age (yes, including my own two daughters).

But this initiative isn’t ready for prime-time yet. I’m looking for help adding more educational pedagogical rigor to this initiative, securing these mini-apps with the robustness and security required to work with youth, and co-creating a more scalable module that might work in classrooms, after-school clubs, or robotics programs.

If this sounds like something that you’d be interested in partnering on in a second iteration of this program, let’s talk. And then… let’s build it.

Acknowledgements
Thank you to Dan Steinberg, and the entire staff of the Harlem Link Summer School initiative for piloting this program with me this summer, to the students for their incredibly thoughtful and open-minded participation, and to Matt Hamilton, who collaborated with me on this project.

I’m excited to introduce Make with Miko, a pilot program I built this summer to introduce foundational AI concepts to K-5 learners. This program is designed to help elementary aged learners who are growing up in the AI Age develop an early vocabulary and mental model for both understanding and building with AI. Here’s what it looks like today, and how I’d like it to evolve from here.

Over the past year, I’ve become increasingly fluent in building AI tools, frameworks, and applications for myself and for others. What’s made this journey even more rewarding has been the chance to teach while building, applying what I’ve learned in communities that don’t always get access to this information firsthand.

This past year, I’ve experimented with bringing AI to unexpected places: into my local block association, where I’ve taught retirees how to build with AI; into schools, partnering with elementary and high school students to co-create alongside me as I iterate on my own app, MuseKat.

Along the way, I’ve continued to have interesting and thought-provoking conversations with my own kids (aged 3 and 5) about the role that AI plays in our lives, how to trust (or not!) these “learning robots” and even experiment with parental-guided co-play. I wondered: Is there a safe, facilitated way to introduce some of these foundational concepts at a young age?

That’s why I was so excited to have the opportunity to partner with to Dan Steinberg at Harlem Link Charter School this summer. I’m so appreciative of their willingness to invite me into their classroom of 8- and 9-year-olds to pilot this four-week program.

One of the biggest insights I’ve had from my own AI journey is this: Learning AI is less like using a calculator and more like learning a new language. And like any language, it requires literacy, fluency, and practical application.

As I’ve been building AI applications, I’ve found myself returning to a handful of core skills again and again, skills I now believe are essential for the AI age. They are:

1. Critical thinking

2. Communication

3. Creativity

4. Systems thinking

5. Personal agency

This summer’s pilot was a test: Could we introduce the building blocks of AI while reinforcing those foundational skills?

With Harlem Link’s support, we built a series of weekly lessons around mini-apps that encouraged kids to not just use AI, but to build with it.

Our protagonist was Miko the Meerkat (yes, the same character I use in MuseKat). In Week 1, Miko helped us explore the idea that “learning robots” (our shorthand for explaining LLMs to kids) can sometimes be confident but wrong. Students played a game called Miko, That’s Not Right! where Miko would describe objects around the room with intentionally flawed AI-generated captions.

For example: A picture of yellow pencils might be described by Miko as “red pencils. It was up to the students to shout, “Miko, that’s not right!”

This sparked immediate engagement and set the stage for discussions around critical thinking and error-spotting in AI systems.

In Week 2, we tackled systems thinking and communication with a game called Guess the Rule. Students created sorting rules based on physical objects and then took pictures of items that matched those rules. Miko then had to guess what the rule was.

For example: A student might sort objects by color (say, red) and include a red ball, a red pencil, and a red pom-pom, but throw in a green crayon as the “exception.” Miko would guess the rule, and students would critique or correct Miko’s logic.

This helped them understand how AI is trained, and how important clear input and feedback are in building better systems.

This week was all about creativity and agency. We encouraged students to design their own “learning robots.” Each student drew a character on paper and worked in groups to give their robot personality traits and backstories.

From “Snowflake the Princess” to “Sigma Monster the Water Monster,” the characters were imaginative, hilarious, and deeply personal. We selected a few of these to develop further, adding detail like where the robot lives, who its friends are, and what it’s curious to learn about.

In our final week, we gave students’ characters a digital life. We used AI-generated audio to bring their voices to life and developed simple personas to guide how the characters spoke and behaved. Students then listened as their own creations told stories about objects in the classroom.

This full-circle moment of drawing a character, building a backstory, programming it with a voice, and then hearing it speak was profoundly empowering for the kids. It made AI feel tangible, personal, and of course, buildable.

I had so much fun making these apps and building this pilot in real-time with young learners this summer. Not only were did the students engage as users, but as builders and even critics. They can spot mistakes, teach machines, and design tools that reflect their unique perspectives. I believe these concepts will become important foundational structures for anyone growing up in the so-called AI Age (yes, including my own two daughters).

But this initiative isn’t ready for prime-time yet. I’m looking for help adding more educational pedagogical rigor to this initiative, securing these mini-apps with the robustness and security required to work with youth, and co-creating a more scalable module that might work in classrooms, after-school clubs, or robotics programs.

If this sounds like something that you’d be interested in partnering on in a second iteration of this program, let’s talk. And then… let’s build it.

Acknowledgements
Thank you to Dan Steinberg, and the entire staff of the Harlem Link Summer School initiative for piloting this program with me this summer, to the students for their incredibly thoughtful and open-minded participation, and to Matt Hamilton, who collaborated with me on this project.