<
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/05/26/my-kid-vibe-coded-their-way-to-actually-learning-math/>
"I’ve spoken to enough teachers and professors to know that LLM tools are
absolutely a challenge for many of them in the classroom. Many struggle with
making sure they’re actually teaching students how to learn, worrying that the
tools are doing the work for them, and skipping over the actual learning. Many
are (understandably) resorting to outright bans on students using the tools
(which they often know they can’t enforce). Others say that students can use
these tools but are fully responsible for any work they turn in, hoping that
this will encourage students to be wary of relying too much on the tech. Still
others are trying clever workarounds (I appreciate the assignment in which
students are asked to have an LLM generate an essay and then the student has to
review/grade the essay themselves, which is engaging and also teaches some of
the limitations of the tools).
But I’ve also heard from both teachers/professors and students that there are
concerns that as students go out into the job market, having some skills with
these tools is often a requirement in whatever fields they pursue, leading them
to wonder how to best teach the subject in a world where LLM tech isn’t likely
to go away, and is seen as part of the toolbox that many employers will expect
their employees to use.
I don’t necessarily have good answers to that, but I did recently have an
experience in my own home that struck me as potentially relevant as an example
of how the tech can actually be useful as a learning tool. I’ve been meaning to
write about this for a few months now, but there always seemed to be something
more urgent to cover. With the school year almost over, I figure I should get
this out. For all the talk of how kids are cheating using AI, it might be worth
showing at least one example where the tool is genuinely useful — in this case,
one of my kids and their friends.
At the beginning of this year I had actually set up my kids with some (very
sandboxed) agentic coding tools, after walking them through how I used such
tools for a fairly simple project so they could see both how it worked, but
also some of the limitations with the tools.
Soon after that, my 12-year-old had asked about my opinion on AI in schools. We
talked through how using them to avoid doing the work is genuinely damaging to
learning, but there are cases where they can be legitimately helpful. I used
the calculator analogy: you first have to learn basic arithmetic by hand, but
once you genuinely understand it, a calculator is a perfectly legitimate tool
for tackling harder problems — it stops being a crutch and starts being a
multiplier.
Apparently that analogy stuck, because what happened later was that analogy
made real.
Once I had set my kids up with the tools, they did what most people do with
them: created some fun games. A couple of months went by and they hadn’t used
them much more. In early March, however, the 12-year-old came home and told me
there was a math test that Friday and some classmates were doing an online
study group. They worked through some problems together in a live voice chat,
but afterward my kid stayed at the computer for a while longer before calling
me over to take a look.
“I vibe coded a system to help study.”"
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
