Why I want your child to fail — and fail often

The physical robot is what makes it click. When a child writes code to move a robot forward and it turns left instead, something that a screen alone can't produce. They can see exactly what went wrong, right in front of them. They learn quickly that the computer isn't guessing at what they mean. It's doing exactly what they said. If you want something specific, you have to say it specifically. That turns out to be the same skill that makes a good AI prompt. And a good engineering brief. And a good question, that's it.

AI literacy is a big part of our curriculum. Not in a "here's how to use ChatGPT" way, but in a "here's how this actually works, and here's where it goes wrong" way. We talk about how machines learn to recognise images and sounds. We talk about hallucinations, safety, and spotting AI-generated content, and why that matters. We teach them to think of AI the way their parents think of a search engine: enormously useful, not inherently trustworthy, and only as good as the question you ask it.

Discussing AI often provokes curiosity across subjects in a single conversation. Philosophy, maths, history, science, languages. That kind of cross-disciplinary exploration used to require a library visit and a lot of luck. Now it's a prompt away, and teaching children to do it well, critically, with good questions, is something schools should be doing now. We want children to understand how to use that power wisely, guided by good questions and critical thinking, rather than discovering it unsupervised through a random video online.

This generation will be the first to grow up with AI as a fundamental layer of society, much like my generation grew up with personal computers and the internet. Here's what worries me: the regulations that will govern AI are being written right now, by people who won't be living under them. The children in our clubs will. They'll have eighty, maybe a hundred years ahead of them in a world where AI and robots are as fundamental as the internet and devices are today. They should be the ones helping to shape how it works — not because I'm being idealistic, but because they're the only ones who'll actually have to live with the consequences. They deserve to understand it, to question it, and ultimately to help shape it.

We are not here to produce engineers or programmers, though some of them may become exactly that. We are here to make sure that when these children grow up and sit at the table where decisions about AI and robots are made — as employees, as citizens, as voters, as leaders — they will not be intimidated by what they do not understand. They will have been there before. They will have broken things, fixed things, and learned that failure, handled well, is just the beginning of the answer.