Any parent today struggles with managing the screen time of their kids. Within that battle is also the question of how that screen time is used. There are certainly educational and enriching activities available for kids but, left to their own devices, children (like many adults) will often gravitate towards the digital equivalent of junk food.
I have a 10 year old and one of the things I’ve long wanted to make available to him, if it meets his interest, is building software. It says more about me than him that it’s software and not tree houses but also, I live in NYC, who has a tree to put a house in? (Clearly it’s not the tree that’s the real obstacle here but go with me.) We are have screen time battles like any family and I’d like to move my children from just consuming to creating in these spaces. I want for them to interact in ways that are net positives rather than the addictive blight they can be on many.
If my son doesn’t have Nintendo switch time and we aren’t watching him closely, he will play the most vapid little games on the internet. I love a game as much as anyone else so trust that I’m not judging the whole category but I’m definitely judging the crap games. I’d already mentioned to him that if he wanted help building a game I’d be excited to do that with him. And, in fact, if he built the game, he could play for as long as he wanted.
Couple days ago a video surfaced of an 8 yo building something using the AI powered IDE from Cursor.com and I shared the video with him. This morning he woke up and told me out of the blue he wanted to do something with me. He wanted to build something. I present to you, Master Boga! He wanted to create, like the girl in the video, a chat app that allowed you to interact with Master Khoga from the Nintendo Zelda games. Claude demurred initially on stepping on copyrighted material but after the faintest of nudges, seemed quite content to bring Master “Boga” to life.
Try out Artifacts created by Claude users
I wanted to give my son a self-contained environment to play with so we had to go back and forth a little bit to make sure it was an app that Claude could preview itself. The app has canned responses it cycles through but my did ask Claude itself to role play as Master “Boga” and he enjoyed that greatly. More than anything, he enjoyed sharing with family what he’d created and seeing their responses.
I’m looking forward to more build sessions with him. The ability to build something interesting has become much more widely accessible and I think these tools might help him unlock that activity. Yesterday, he used ChatGPT to help him author a funny argument for more screen time that he sent to us. I think the key is to guide him to leverage these tools in an empowering way rather than as replacements for his own thinking.
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Saadiq Rodgers-King
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Kid Builders: Would you like to play a game? Ever wonder how to make screen time more meaningful? I recently helped my 10-year-old son build his first app using AI tools. We turned our usual screen time battles into a creative coding adventure. He went from playing games to making them! We both had a great time and hopefully it will lead to more. The key for me is helping him understand how to use these tools to empower himself rather than as just crutches.