📣 AI Family Lab - a one hour hands-on workshop for parents and kids (ages 5-11) to learn together. Last few spots remaining!
🌟 Founder musings
Teaching AI before AI teaches them
Last week something shifted for me. I overheard my daughter telling her friend that ChatGPT and Gemini may not always be right, because they only know what we teach them. Oversimplified, yes, but she had internalized it. That came from building the AI model together for the Presidential AI Challenge, not from a lesson.
I also talk to her about what happens when AI goes wrong. Like the news from PocketOS yesterday, where an unmoderated AI deleted a company's entire database. She needs to know both sides, the power and the risk, and I'd much rather she hear it from me first than stumble into it.
Then a friend texted asking if I could share the materials I used to build with her, so he could do something useful over the long weekend with his son. I shared what I had, and then realized, this needs to be much more widely available. That's what led to the AI Family Lab.
It's one of our fastest selling programs, 5 sign-ups in the first two hours. I'm genuinely excited for the session on May 10. It's going to be hands-on, thought-provoking, and actionable. Please help us spread the word to any parents and kids you know.
On the speaking front, I'm back at CU Boulder next week, and this time I want to go beyond agents. I'm going to map specific AI tools to each phase of real consulting and research work, so students can place each tool in context of what they're actually doing, not just learn what it does. Applied AI, not just tools. That's Flintolabs all the way. I'll post back next week on how it went.
And it's Boulder Startup Week! Lots of AI sessions on the agenda and I'm looking forward to connecting with this amazing startup community. Flintolabs will be at the Startup Fair, come find us.
-Janani
🗓️ Opportunities to not miss for high schoolers!
Online entry deadline: Wednesday, May 27, 2026 · Celebration livestream: June 24, 2026 · Registration: Open now
What: Coolest Projects is the Raspberry Pi Foundation's free, global technology showcase for young people up to age 18. Students submit projects in one of several categories, including a dedicated AI category, an online gallery displays all entries, and a worldwide celebration livestream on June 24 gives every participant a moment on the global stage. Unlike high-pressure competitions, this is designed as a supportive showcase where students get real feedback from judges and recognition regardless of ranking.
Who: Any student up to age 18, anywhere in the world. Students can enter individually or in teams of up to five. The AI category is open to anyone who has built something using AI, whether a chatbot, image classifier, recommendation system, or any applied AI project.
Format: Submit your project online with a short video walkthrough and supporting materials (photos, code, diagrams, whatever suits the project). Judges provide personalized feedback on every entry. VIP judges highlight standout projects during the June 24 livestream. There are also in-person showcase events in the US: Minnesota (April 11) and Atlanta (May 2) for students who want to present live.
Why it's great: Every participant receives a certificate and a personalized judge's review, making this genuinely useful for portfolios and college applications regardless of outcome. It gives students who have already built something a legitimate, respected venue to show it off, and it gives students who have been "almost done" with a project a concrete deadline to actually finish.
Perfect for: Any student who has built an AI app, game, website, or hardware project and wants a reason to polish it and share it with the world.
🚀 Stay Inspired
🤝 Why is the layoff-rehiring loop happening ?
Companies across customer service, content, and software made a sweeping bet between 2023 and 2026: replace costly human labor with AI and unlock a new era of efficiency. Boards approved it. CFOs modeled it. CEOs announced it. That bet didn't go quite as expected.
A February 2026 survey by workforce firm Careerminds found that two in three companies that made AI-driven cuts are already rehiring. Of those, more than a third had brought back over half the roles they cut. The financial case proved equally weak, with nearly 31% of organizations saying rehiring ended up costing more than the layoffs had saved, and another 42% saying costs roughly canceled each other out.
The core issue wasn't the technology. It was a misreading of what the technology could actually do. When Klarna automated its customer service, claiming its AI chatbot could handle the equivalent of 700 human agents, satisfaction scores declined. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski eventually acknowledged the company had prioritized cost over experience and began rehiring. AI could handle the predictable 30% of interactions. The other 70%, the frustrated customers, the edge cases, the situations requiring judgment and genuine relationship, had nowhere to go.
What this means for students building now: the human-AI partnership is not a phase. It's the design. Companies that are getting this right are asking which tasks are genuinely automatable, then redeploying their best people to do what AI can't: use judgment, build relationships, and manage complexity. The students who understand both sides of that equation - what AI can do and what it cannot - are exactly who those companies will need.
📚 134 AI literacy bills in 31 states. Schools still don't know what to do.
A piece published this week in Psychology Today surfaced a striking tension in American education: at the exact same moment schools are banning phones and reducing screens, 134 bills requiring AI literacy have been introduced across 31 states. Georgia and Mississippi are already building AI instruction into graduation requirements.
The article, written by a digital literacy educator, makes the case that restriction and education aren't in conflict. Students don't need to be on screens all day to learn how to think critically about AI. What they need is a skilled teacher, rich discussion, and the space to build critical thinking. And that's precisely what a low-tech classroom can still offer.
The deeper problem isn't the bills or the bans. It's that most parents are navigating this alone. Nearly three-quarters of parents report their child's school has not sent home any information about AI policies. Half say they don't even know whether their child's teachers are encouraging or discouraging AI use. Meanwhile, kids are moving faster than their schools on this.
Parents who want real guidance, not reactive bans and not unstructured access, are largely on their own. The article summarizes this well - “Restriction without education doesn’t work.” That's exactly the gap we want to close with the Flintolabs AI Family Lab. Learning to build with AI, rather than just use it or fear it, is how families get ahead of this conversation.
💻 Program spotlight
Learning to think with Claude: a peek into what our students learn
Every few months, Flintolabs adds a new session to the curriculum when the tools are moving fast enough that waiting doesn't make sense. This spring, students worked through a three-part deep dive into Claude, AI-assisted coding, and agents, covering territory that most professionals in the workforce are still figuring out.
The sessions started at the foundation: what Claude actually is, how it fits alongside tools like Cowork and other AI systems, and how agents and subagents work together to accomplish complex tasks. Not a lecture, but a live working session where students built intuition by doing. They moved from understanding what the tools can do to understanding why they work the way they do.
From there, students opened Cursor, with an Anthropic API key provided by Flintolabs so they could actually use Claude without the friction of setting it up themselves, and started building. They wrote code with Claude's help, tested what they got, debugged when it broke, and pushed their working app to GitHub. The whole loop: idea, build, test, ship. This is what engaged engineering looks like, as opposed to just telling an AI what you want and blindly using the output. Understanding what's being built, and staying engaged with it as it takes shape, is the skill companies are now discovering they can't automate away.
The prompting framework students use runs through three principles they return to constantly: write what you want in your own words first, then refine it with AI by asking what's missing and filling it in, then prompt with the full context so the model has everything it needs to do the job well. They also learn practical token management, because when you're paying for API calls, clarity becomes a discipline, not just a preference.
What Flintolabs students are learning in these sessions is something many working professionals haven't tried yet: not just how to prompt, but how to think alongside an AI system at a level where they can direct it, evaluate it, and improve on what it produces. That's the gap the Forbes article talks about. And these students are closing it in middle and high school, before most people even start.
🔥 Lots of ways to build real AI skills this summer
🌞 Summer camps - two ways to get started
Week-long, virtual, hands-on AI building. For students starting 7th grade and up.
AI Launchpad — 1 week · Go from zero to shipping your own AI-powered app by Friday.
AI Internship Track — 5 weeks · Everything in Launchpad, plus a real project, portfolio page, demo day with tech leaders, and resume experience.
Cohorts run May 24 through August. Spots are capped at 15 per cohort.
🎓 Flagship program - for middle and high schoolers
Six months. One hour a week. Build real AI applications, earn 3 transferable college credits from the University of Colorado Denver, and complete a real-world internship that prepares you for college and the workforce with confidence.
Next cohort start Saturday, June 7.
👨👩👧 AI Family Lab — for parents and elementary school kids
Introduce AI to your child on your own terms. A 60-minute virtual workshop where parents and kids ages 5–11 build their first AI model together. No experience needed. Just curiosity.
May 10 · 9 am PST · 10 am MST · 12 pm ET · $49 per family (early bird ends May 3) · Capped at 15 spots
Our program has a 5-star rating with reviews from both students and parents. Questions? Email us at [email protected]
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