📣 Summer camps are now open: Build an AI app for a real challenge in a week; Go from AI-curious to AI-ready this summer!
🌟 Founder musings
The deep end is coming. Purpose-driven builders won't be afraid of it.
This past Sunday, I had the privilege of judging the semifinals of the CU Boulder High School New Venture Challenge. Ninety teams entered. Twenty-four made the semifinals. Six made the finals. Every single one of them showed up with a working product, a real story, and a conviction that made you forget you were watching teenagers.
The winner, AquaPuck, is a small silicone puck that attaches to your water bottle and tracks how much water you've consumed, syncing to your phone via Bluetooth. The team had already applied for a provisional patent and pledged a portion of profits to a clean water nonprofit. That's not just entrepreneurship, that's purpose-driven entrepreneurship.
But the ideas that didn't make the finals stayed with me just as much. reMind, an app for dementia patients and their caregivers to store and retrieve memories. A water purification solution addressing impurities before filtration. FetchaFriend, built in partnership with a local pet adoption center, using a chatbot to help families find the right pet to adopt. When I saw FetchaFriend, I immediately thought of Hypocats, the app one of our own Flintolabs students built last summer. Same instinct: take a manual, overwhelming process and make it simple and personal. The only difference was the context.
This week I also sat in on a couple of forums with leaders from across industries, not all of them from tech. Every single one of them was attending AI workshops at work, learning how to use AI to be more efficient. It struck me that students learning and using AI today aren't just ahead of other students. They're likely in the top 5% of everyone, students and professionals alike, who know how to use and build with AI. That's not something to take lightly.
As I have conversations with parents enrolling their children for the summer camp, I hear this over and over again - “I’d like for them to understand how to use AI effectively and its limits much before they are thrown in the deep end.” and I applaud those parents. Staying away from something that’s so dynamic is not going to be the way to catch up to it; building skills to understand the foundations and developing the confidence to adapt to the flavor of the technology that’s relevant is what’s going to help the next generation that enters a very different looking workforce.
-Janani
🗓️ Opportunities to not miss for high schoolers!
Registration opens: June 1, 2026 · Competition: Early 2027 · Start preparing: Now
What: The USA-North America AI Olympiad is one of the most prestigious AI competitions in the world for K-12 students. Organized by USAAIO, it selects and trains Team USA to compete at two international AI Olympiads: the International Olympiad in AI (IOAI) and the International AI Olympiad (IAIO). In 2026, Team USA brought home one Gold, one Silver, and two Honorable Mentions at the international competition in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Registration for the 2027 cycle opens June 1, 2026, giving students the summer to start preparing.
Who: Open to all K-12 students in the United States and Canada. No prior competition experience required, but strong math, Python, and machine learning foundations are helpful.
Format: Multiple rounds leading to a national competition hosted at Harvard and MIT. Top performers are selected to represent the USA internationally. Past events have included career panels from MIT's Institute for Artificial Intelligence, MIT admissions sessions, and social events with the country's most competitive young AI minds.
Why it's great: This is the most competitive AI-specific academic olympiad in the country. Making it to nationals, let alone the international stage, is a rare and powerful college application differentiator. The preparation process alone, covering machine learning, data science, and AI problem-solving, builds real depth. And registration opens on June 1, right when Flintolabs summer camp starts.
Perfect for: The student who wants to go deep on AI, not just build with it, and is ready to compete at the highest level.
🚀 Stay Inspired
🏆 High schoolers. A stage. A real problem.
What do these get you? You get ideas that rival anything you'd see at a startup demo day. Last Sunday, CU Boulder hosted its annual High School New Venture Challenge, where 90 teams competed for a share of $25,000 in scholarships. Six made the finals. Every one of them showed up with a working product, customer research, and the kind of conviction that makes you forget you're watching teenagers.
The winner, AquaPuck, tracks daily water intake via a Bluetooth-connected puck on your water bottle. The team had already applied for a patent and pledged a portion of profits to a clean water nonprofit. Other finalists built a ski boot buckle tool (SnoPop), a ski equipment carrier (The Ski Sling), a public speaking anxiety app (Pitch Perfect), a student-to-intern matching platform (Intern Bridge), and a restaurant loyalty gift system for teachers (GIFD), designed by a solo freshman. Every single idea started with a problem the student had personally experienced.
What makes events like this worth paying attention to is what they reveal about the gap between having an idea and building something real. These students didn't just have ideas. They had products. They had iteration stories. They had customers. That doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't happen by sitting in a classroom.
The skills on display, analytical thinking, creative problem-solving, adaptability, and the ability to pitch a vision clearly, are exactly what employers and universities say they can't find. They're also exactly what you develop when you build something real under a deadline.
🏛️ AI literacy now has a national standard. Most students don't meet it yet.
In February 2026, the U.S. Department of Labor published the country's first national AI Literacy Framework — five foundational content areas and seven delivery principles defining what AI literacy actually means for the American workforce. This isn't a suggestion buried in a policy memo. It's a federal signal that AI skills are now foundational, not optional, for every worker in every industry.
The framework makes one thing very clear: having access to AI tools is not the same as being AI literate. What the DOL is describing goes much deeper than knowing how to use ChatGPT or Gemini. It includes understanding how AI models actually work, evaluating outputs critically rather than accepting them at face value, directing AI effectively through well-structured prompts, and using AI responsibly with accountability for what you produce. These are skills that have to be integrated into real work, not taught in isolation. The framework is explicit: experiential, contextual, hands-on learning is the only delivery method that actually produces the capability employers are looking for.
What's striking is how few education programs, at any level, come close to meeting this standard. Most schools teach students to use AI as a shortcut. The framework is asking for something different: people who understand AI well enough to make judgment calls about when to use it, when not to, and how to evaluate what it gives back.
Flintolabs didn't design its program to match a government framework. We designed it to prepare students for the world they're actually walking into. The alignment turned out to be near-complete, not because we were following the DOL's lead, but because the DOL consulted the people actually using AI in real work, and those people pointed to exactly the same things Flintolabs has been doing from the start.
💻 Student spotlight
From frustration to a working app: meet Mathumitha and ClefShift
Every musician who plays in one clef and needs to read music written in another knows the frustration. You're a trumpet player handed a piano score. You're a cellist looking at treble clef. Transposing notes from one clef to another is tedious, error-prone, and eats up practice time. Existing tools are clunky, expensive, or just don't work well.
Mathumitha C., a 9th grader from North Carolina, knew this problem firsthand. She's a musician herself, and she decided to do something about it.
The app she built is called ClefShift. Upload a sheet music PDF, select your target clef, treble, bass, or tenor, and get your transposed score automatically. Clean interface. No fuss. Just the notes you need, in the clef you need them in.
What's worth noticing isn't just the idea. It's how she built it. Mathumitha didn't grab the first API she found and call it done. She evaluated multiple music processing APIs, compared their capabilities, chose the one that best fit her needs, and when her first version had problems, she debugged and iterated until the output improved. That's not a student completing an assignment. That's a builder working through real tradeoffs.
She did all of this in four weeks as part of the Flintolabs Foundations cohort. Four weeks from zero to a deployed, working application that solves a real problem for real musicians.
If you play an instrument, try it. Seriously.
🔥 Real AI skills. Real internships. Before college.
🎁 Summer camp enrollment open — and May cohort closes soon
The students at the CU Boulder New Venture Challenge showed up with working products. The students at Flintolabs do the same, in our program.
Here's what you get with just one hour per 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
The gap between AI-curious and AI-ready is one summer. Don't let it close without your student on the right side of it.
May cohort starts Saturday, May 2!
🌞 Summer is coming and so is your first AI app.
Flintolabs is launching two summer programs for students starting 7th grade:
AI Launchpad — 1 week, virtual, $399. Daily live Zoom sessions and hands-on labs. Students go from zero to shipping their own AI-powered app by Friday, covering APIs, OpenAI, Cursor, v0, Vercel, and GitHub.
AI Internship Track — 5 weeks, virtual, $999. Everything in AI Launchpad, plus a real 4-week internship project matched to the student's interests, a portfolio page, demo day with tech leaders, and real resume experience.
Spots are capped at 15 students per cohort. Weekly cohorts run from May 24 through August.
Our program has a 5-star rating with reviews from both students and parents. Questions? Email us at [email protected]
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