📣 Summer camps are now open: Early bird pricing active until April 15. Build a real AI app in a week; Go from AI-curious to AI-ready this summer!
🌟 Founder musings
What it means to understand, not just use
I wrote about the AI documentary last week and I did go out and see it. I think the crux of it is down to this: do we understand this thing that we are building that could take over us. I didn't walk away with confidence that the people building it understood everything, but that's a discussion for another time.
What is very apparent though is how this plays out with AI tools. Everyday on LinkedIn and Youtube, I come across newer ways of using Claude and what people have built with OpenClaw. They’ve figured out a part of their life that has gotten better using the tool. I almost think AI is like a treadmill. If you know how to use it the right way and are consistent with it, you get far better results than being a casual user. But how do you develop that? It comes entirely from trying things out, getting stuck, and then finally figuring it out.
As a hiring manager, one of the things I’ve seen as the very first signs of success in a strong engineer is this: they are resourceful. They figure things out by asking the internet or the right people. They are laser focused on unblocking themselves as they move toward their goal.
A couple of weeks ago we launched a pilot of our internships, and this week, chatting with one of the high schoolers working on a project, they said "the instructions weren't entirely all there but I figured it out and I'm on my way." That gave me so much joy. That is a skill that will serve them for decades, and they just learned the lesson most people only learn in their first job. Ayesha and I are very clear now on what we need to offer to help students build the right core skills from the start, especially since it's not clear entry-level roles will even exist four years from now.
And finally this week started with an interview for the regional competition of the Presidential AI challenge. The project I coached my 7-year old to build was one of the state champions. She built an AI model that could recognize the fruit or veggie you show it and tell you facts about it along with being able to earn points and a streak; just making eating healthy fun. When the interviewer asked her what would happen if she showed an ice cream cone to the model, she thought for a moment and said “It will probably recognize it as the closest vegetable or fruit that it think it looks like, because we have shown the AI model only pictures of fruits and veggies.’ That’s it! I was so glad that she actually understood and inernalized that AI models work on what you teach them. I’m glad she’s learning to dream with the help of AI.
This week is an exciting one for us. We've launched our summer camps with early bird pricing through April 15. And many of our students have graduated through the program into flinternships, where they'll put to use everything they learned to build tools available on our marketplace. But remember, it's not the tool itself. It's the learning of how to put AI tools to the right use, the decision making, the autonomy, and the ability to figure things out along the way. That's the gold.
-Janani
🗓️ Opportunities to not miss for high schoolers!
Registration deadline: June 30, 2026, 11:59 p.m. ET · Finalist presentations: August 13, 2026, Washington DC
What: The University of the District of Columbia invites high school innovators from anywhere in the world to develop a new business or product concept with international market potential and pitch it to a panel of expert judges. This isn't a hypothetical exercise, teams build real pitches for real markets and defend their thinking live.
Who: High school students from any country. Teams of up to three students.
Format: Virtual submission first, the Capital Cup Committee reviews all entries and selects five finalists by July 15. Finalists travel to Washington DC on August 13 to deliver an eight-minute live presentation followed by five minutes of Q&A with judges in front of a live audience. Teams may use slides, visual aids, or props, but the pitch must stand on its own.
Why it's great: The combination of a virtual submission with a high-stakes in-person final is excellent preparation for what real entrepreneurship actually looks like, a pitch deck gets you in the room, but it's your ability to defend your thinking under pressure that wins. That's a skill that shows up on every college application, internship interview, and startup pitch for the rest of a student's life.
Perfect for: Students with a business idea they've been sitting on, or those who have been building AI projects and want to frame them as ventures. The international market focus pushes teams to think beyond their own community, exactly the kind of expansive thinking colleges and employers look for.
🚀 Stay Inspired
📊 Only 5% of workers are truly AI fluent: here's what separates them
A new report from Google and Ipsos just found that despite all the AI hype, only 5% of workers have actually redesigned significant portions of their work using AI. The rest - including the 60% who aren't using AI on the job at all - are watching from the sidelines.
That 5% isn't just more productive. They're on a fundamentally different career trajectory. AI fluent workers are 4.5 times as likely to report earning higher wages and four times as likely to have received a promotion connected to their AI ability. They also save a median of eight hours per week compared to three hours for workers just experimenting with tools.
What makes the finding particularly sharp is the reason most people give for not using AI: 53% say they don't think AI applies to what they do. It's not fear. It's a failure of imagination and it's costing them.
The gap between knowing about AI and actually building with it is where careers diverge. The students learning to use AI not as a shortcut but as a genuine extension of their thinking; the ones who understand what it's doing and why are the ones who will land on the right side of that gap.
🤖 If AI can finish your homework, what are you actually learning?
In February, a 22-year-old developer launched an AI tool called Einstein that could log into Canvas, watch lectures, write papers, join discussions, and submit homework, automatically, around the clock. It was taken down within days after a legal challenge. But the question it raised didn't go away: if AI can complete an entire course, what exactly is a credential certifying?
Einstein's creator, Advait Paliwal, said that was the whole point. He believes higher education has drifted from real learning into credentialism, and he wanted to force the conversation. It worked. Over 124,000 people visited the site in three days, and educators across the country started asking hard questions about what their courses were actually measuring.
One educator's warning cuts right to the stakes: if students can game credentials with AI, those credentials become suspect in the job market for everyone, even the students who did the real work. The fix isn't banning AI. It's designing learning that AI can't fake projects, oral defenses, real things built and demonstrated in front of other people.
That's a preview of what education needs to become. And it's exactly what students building real AI applications today are already doing.
💻 Program spotlight
When your phone becomes a portal: building augmented reality
Most people experience augmented reality every day without thinking much about it. The filter that puts puppy ears on your face. The arrow floating over the road in your navigation app. The IKEA furniture you "place" in your living room before buying it. AR is everywhere and until recently, building it required specialized teams and expensive tools.
Our Mastery track students are building it in three weeks.
The AR unit starts with the fundamentals that most courses never teach: what augmented reality actually is at a technical level. Not the consumer experience of it, but the mechanics underneath. Students learn how a device's camera and sensors work together to map the real world in real time, how the software anchors virtual objects to physical surfaces, and how interaction works — how a tap, a gesture, or the position of your face becomes an input that the program responds to. Face tracking is one of the concepts that lands hardest. When students realize that what looks like "magic" is really a set of coordinate points being mapped and updated dozens of times per second, the magic doesn't disappear. It gets more interesting.
By the end of three weeks, each student has built a working AR application of their own, something that uses the camera, responds to the real world, and creates an experience that didn't exist before they built it.
That progression, from "I've used AR" to "I built something with AR," is exactly the kind of shift that changes how a student sees technology for the rest of their life. The world stops being a thing that happens to them and starts being something they can build on top of.
🔥 The 5% don't wait. Neither should you.
🎁 Summer camps open & April cohort kicks off this Saturday
🏕️ AI Summer Camp 2026 — enrollment is open
🎉 Early bird ends April 15. Save $50 today.
AI Launchpad — 1 week · $399 $449 Build and ship a real AI app by Friday. Virtual, daily live Zoom, ages 12+. Grab your spot →
AI Internship Track ⭐ — 5 weeks · $949 $999 Launchpad week + a real 4-week internship. Portfolio. Demo Day. Resume-ready. Grab your spot →
Max 15 students per cohort. These fill fast.
Here's what you get with our flagship year-round program - just one hour a week for 6 months:
✅ Hands-on AI skills through building real applications, not watching lectures
✅ 3 transferable college credits from University of Colorado Denver
✅ Portfolio of real work that demonstrates capability to colleges and employers
✅ Small class sizes (capped at 20 students) ensuring personalized attention
✅ Advanced concepts like OpenCV, Minimax algorithms, computer vision, and more
✅ The critical thinking and problem-solving skills employers desperately need
April cohort starts this Saturday, April 4. A few spots still open.
5-star rated. Questions? [email protected]
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