AI Camp · Program design · 15 October 2026

Kids build the AI. They stay the boss.

Three original courses, rebuilt as four age-banded camps where kids build real AI agents for the parts of life they care about, and stay the boss of them.

Read the program design Meet the camps

The idea

Every camper leaves with something that works, built for a part of their own life they chose. The original three courses stay intact: AI Mastery for Living Life (personal, social and work/school agents), AI Mastery for the Work/School World (Tech, Arts and Biz), and AI Mastery for Personal & Social Life. What changes by age is the tooling, how much autonomy the agent gets, and how deep the "how does it actually work" goes. The through-line at every age is the same: you are the boss of your agent, and your agent should push you toward real people and real work, not away from them.

Four camps, one through-line

The original three courses run at every age. The tools, the autonomy and the depth grow with the camper.

Ages 8-11

AI Explorers

Teach a computer to see, hear and help, then design a robot sidekick for your own life, all without a chatbot login.

My Robot Sidekick
Invent-o-Rama
Healthy Me, Happy Crew

Read the syllabus Ages 12-14

AI Builders

Design a crew of AI agents for your life, find your spike in STEM, media or making a difference, and learn to spot when AI is bluffing.

Level Up: Build Your Agent Crew
Spike Lab
Squad Goals
Second Brain, First AgentNew

Read the syllabus Ages 15+

AI Makers

Build real, working AI agents for your life, your spike and your people, with the judgment to know when the AI should step aside.

Main Character Energy
Spike Season
Signal Over Noise
Memory PalaceNew

Read the syllabus Ages 15+ Advanced

AI Architects

Write code that calls models, give agents real tools, measure whether they work, and ship one that someone else relies on.

Agent Forge
Venture Studio Sprint
Mirror, Not Master
ExocortexNew

Read the syllabus

Understand, apply, create

Where each camp sits on UNESCO's progression levels for AI competency.

Ages 8-11
AI ExplorersUnderstand, with a taste of Apply
Ages 12-14
AI BuildersApply
Ages 15+
AI MakersApply into Create
Ages 15+ Advanced
AI ArchitectsCreate

Principles that hold at every age

1
Projects, peers, passion, play. Campers build things they care about, with others, by tinkering. This is Mitchel Resnick's "Four P's of Creative Learning," the design basis for Scratch. It also matches what self-determination theory says sustains motivation: autonomy, competence and relatedness. The original course copy already asks kids to pick what matters to them. We keep that choice at the centre.
2
Coach, not crutch. In a field experiment with nearly a thousand high-school math students, unrestricted GPT-4 access improved practice scores, but students did 17% worse once access was removed. A tutor version that gave hints instead of answers largely removed the harm. A carefully designed AI tutor at Harvard, by contrast, produced more than double the learning gains of an active-learning class. The design lesson is that the same technology helps or hurts depending on whether it does the thinking for you. Every agent campers build has to make them do something, not just do it for them.
3
Brain first, then the bot. An early, not-yet-peer-reviewed MIT Media Lab study found lower brain engagement and weaker recall among adults who wrote essays with ChatGPT than among those who wrote unaided. It's preliminary, but it supports a simple camp rhythm: every build starts with a few minutes of unplugged thinking on paper before anyone opens a tool.
4
No companion bots. Common Sense Media rates social AI companions an "unacceptable" risk and recommends nobody under 18 use them. In its 2025 survey of teens, it found many already do. So the Personal & Social courses never build an AI friend. They build agents that point you toward real people.
5
Real health guidance, not vibes. When a camper builds a fitness or food agent, it is anchored to a public standard. For movement, that's the CDC guideline of 60 minutes or more of moderate-to-vigorous activity a day for ages 6–17.
6
The Agent Card. Every age band uses the same five-part scaffold to describe an agent. It scales from crayons at age 8 to code at 17.

The Four Lenses

No grades for prompts. Every capstone is reviewed through the same four questions.

Purpose

Did you pick something that matters to you, and can you say why?

Human-centred mindset

Build

Does it work? Can someone else use it?

AI techniques & applications

Judgment

Did you test it, catch its mistakes, and fix or flag them?

AI system design

Humanity

Is it fair and safe, and does it push you toward people and real-world action?

Ethics of AI

Open decisions

Delivery: online live, in person, or hybrid? Every syllabus assumes live instruction with a ratio of at most 1:8 for 8–11 and 1:12 for older bands.
Accounts: whether Colearn provisions supervised accounts, which decides the 12–14 and 15+ tool columns.
Data: any camper data that leaves the room (photos for a Teachable Machine model, chatbot logs) needs a written retention rule before launch.
Obsidian for minors: its terms limit use to adults. Confirm with Obsidian whether supervised educational use is allowed before naming it in camp marketing. Until then, Logseq is the camper default.
Hermes hosting: decide where camper sandboxes run, who holds the model keys, and whether memories, skills and vaults are wiped or exported to families at the end of camp.
Grading.md: the existing Grading note in the Colearn folder is empty. The Four Lenses above could fill it.