Dancing robots, digital capybara: Teaching young kids about AI

The Straits Times, Dancing robots, digital capybara: Teaching young kids about AI

Pre-schools and enrichment centres are teaching artificial intelligence (AI) to children as young as three years old.

As some pre-schoolers and primary schoolchildren are being guided to choreograph dancing robots or make digital pets, their parents and educators say early exposure to AI, especially through fun lessons, will equip them with the right skills for a future where AI is more dominant.

However, amid wider societal discussions about fake news and AI-generated images, industry insiders interviewed by The Straits Times are divided on whether there is a correct age to introduce AI to kids.

Some say it is good for them to be exposed as early as possible, while others caution that those under the age of five would not understand concepts like intellectual property.

Robot dances
At ChildFirst Pre-school, kids from Nursery Year 2 (N2) – the year they turn four – to Kindergarten Year 2 (K2) – when they turn six – learn progressively to use AI as part of the curriculum.

Their teachers instruct them in activities such as using voice prompts to generate pictures; making robots do a relay race or navigate obstacles; and designing 3D games using block coding, where users drag and drop jigsaw-like blocks of code, instead of typing in a coding language.

Kindergarten pupils at the ChildFirst@Hillview campus in Upper Bukit Timah, for instance, recently worked on a story using generative-AI tools. This is a form of AI that creates new content like text, audio, images or video, using patterns from data they are trained on.

The children used different programs to write, narrate, illustrate and animate The Great SG60 Ice Kachang Disaster, in which the sun melts large amounts of ice kacang, leaving sticky puddles everywhere and sparking a big clean-up.

K2 pupil Lyanna Poh, six, says she and her team won first prize in a robotics competition in June. It was held among the three ChildFirst pre-schools under the Ednovation group.

Participants had to program a robot within minutes to make it move to its target: a Martian rock.

Lyanna says: “My favourite robot is called Artec. Sometimes, I make the robots dance and sometimes, I make them walk around.”

Using different AI tools at the same time

Dr Richard Yen is the founder of Ednovation, whose 18 Singapore pre-schools – ChildFirst, Cambridge Pre-school and Shaws — have AI and technology in their curriculum. The education company also has pre-schools in China and the Philippines.

“If you look at Bill Gates with the PC (personal computer), Steve Jobs with mobile phones and Mark Zuckerberg in social media, they all started young. They caught their wave, which is how they created entire industries,” says Dr Yen.

Microsoft founder Gates spent time in the computer lab in his American high school and, at age 13, regularly snuck out from home at night to write code at an office he had an arrangement with.

Dr Yen adds: “Today, the biggest wave is AI. That’s why we are providing children with the opportunity to catch this wave when they are young. In the future, they could be industry leaders.”

Ednovation was an early adopter of generative-AI, using and adapting ChatGPT in its pre-schools months after the AI tool made its debut and went viral in November 2022.

AI use is now “multi-modal”, says Dr Yen, where different AI tools can be deployed together, as opposed to a consumer using only ChatGPT.

Ednovation also uses AI as a tutor, he says. For example, its pre-schools use an AI tool to track and increase pupils’ proficiency in Chinese in a customised way. It prompts them to learn certain words and phrases they are unsure of, in order to familiarise the children with these terms and encourage their use.

N2 children – who are three and four years old – do not even use screens when they start learning to code, Dr Yen says.

For instance, their teachers guide them to arrange cards with arrows on them, which are put through a scanner, prompting a robot to follow this sequence of directions.

Fees at ChildFirst pre-schools cost $2,108 a month before government subsidies for pupils from N2 to K2.

Learn to code without learning to code
Some enrichment centres are also keeping pace with the rapidly evolving AI scene globally.

Enrichment provider Ottodot launched its Code With AI workshops in May, where children, aged from eight years old, learn to code without using any coding languages.

Here, the instructor guides the kids to use AI tools like Gemini, V0 and Vercel to make a digital pet simulator and other web applications, which are apps that are accessible through a web browser online.

Ottodot co-founder Khor Le Yi says: “This year, there was an inflection point with vibe coding, where you can use text prompts to write code. Previously, you needed to learn coding tools to code.

“We wanted to use the world that children live in to engage them to learn.”

In vibe coding, users tell the AI what they want in simple language and it writes the code to build the desired software.

The term was popularised by prominent AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in February to explain how developers focus on describing the desired functionality, or “vibe”, rather than writing the code manually.

In an online Ottodot workshop in May, nine-year-old Lanah Toh made a web app inspired by Chewie, her pomeranian, without any coding knowledge. With her father Michael Toh’s help, the Primary 3 pupil created a virtual pet. Users can choose different items such as food – premium fish or “magical kibble” – and accessories (a diamond necklace, a silver collar, a crown or a party hat) for the dog.

Mr Toh, 54, a senior vice-president at a local technology company, says: “This frees the child from doing a lot of mundane work (using coding). I come from a traditional programming background, having studied computer science at university.

“For my generation, the question was: Do you know how to program? The children’s is: What do you want to create?”

“AI is here to stay. The earlier children learn to use it as a tool, the easier it will be for them.”

Other Ottodot web apps created by children using AI include a program where one can feed a digital capybara and watch it grow, as well as software that generates fun history facts. Each session, lasting 2½ hours, costs $200.

What age to start?
Tech insiders interviewed by ST suggest different ages at which children can navigate issues linked to increasing digitalisation, such as excessive screen time, deep fakes, fake news and how to use AI.

Primary schoolchildren should be made aware of the right and wrong ways of interacting with AI, says Mr Poon King Wang, chief strategy and design AI officer at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).

For example, the child should not take what an AI tool generates wholesale and reproduce it as homework.

In contrast, Associate Professor Donny Soh from the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT), where he is the programme leader for applied artificial intelligence, argues for earlier use.

“It’s good for children to be exposed to AI early as it’s only a matter of time (with widespread digitalisation). Kids aged four or five, for instance, are well guided by their instructors in these educational uses.”

Ednovation’s Dr Yen acknowledges that an N2 child is “too young” to understand concepts such as copyright or ethical considerations surrounding what is “real”.

Dr Yen says: “This debate will go on for a long time. The children need to be participating in AI in order to debate it, and to contribute to such debates in a positive way, when they are ready. We hope that they can shape or even lead such debates in the future.”

Providing guardrails

Mr Deddy Setiadi, co-founder of enrichment centre Kodecoon Academy, which teaches coding, robotics, game design and AI courses, thinks that children aged 10 to 14 generally have sufficient emotional maturity and curiosity to navigate AI-related issues.

Kodecoon Academy launched its first workshops on AI content creation, targeting this age group, in October 2024. A five-day workshop, where participants can work on projects like music videos – involving programs such as Suno, an AI music creation program; online design platform Canva; and AI image generator Midjourney – costs $545.

It is important to teach children to assess the merits of individual AI software critically, and provide guardrails to help them be aware of wrong usage, such as community guidelines concerning violence and publishing inappropriate memes of public figures, he says.

Mr Deddy says it helps to be “software-agnostic” in the fast-changing digital landscape.

He adds: “At the end of the day, what do we want our future generation to be? Going through the rigour of tech education helps them develop a creator mindset.

“It’s important to have confidence around technology. It’s harder to teach a child to think: ‘I’m a little programmer.’ In this changing tech space, we need people to think about what to create next.”