| Happy Sunday folks!
For a lot of you, the kids started their summer holidays this week, just as a whole country pulled AI out of its primary classrooms. It lined up with something I'd just written about how AI affects kids' learning, so here's what it means for your summer, and what I made you off the back of it. In this week's email: - 🇳🇴 Why Norway just banned gen-AI for under-13s (and the study that backs them)
- 🧠 The free "tutor, not cheat" prompt I made you
- 🤸 I froze an entire trampoline park with Mateo (15-sec video)
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| 🇳🇴 Why Norway just banned gen-AI for under-13s This week Norway became one of the first countries to put firm limits on AI in schools. From late August, kids in grades 1 to 7 (ages 6 to 13) won't be allowed to use generative AI during school or on school devices. Teens aged 14 to 16 only with a teacher present. The reason the prime minister gave: schools should be teaching kids to read, write and do maths the proper way, because AI lets them skip the bit where the learning actually happens.
It's a classroom rule, not a "your kid can never touch AI" ban. But the reasoning is the interesting part, because there's now a study saying the exact same thing. Researchers gave one group of kids unrestricted ChatGPT and another group an AI tutor that only gave hints. The ChatGPT group looked brilliant during practice, then scored 17% worse on the real test. The hint group held onto what they learned. So the honest answer to “is AI bad for my kid’s learning” is: it depends entirely on whether it does the thinking for them, or makes them do it. I wrote the whole thing up, the studies and the rules we use at home: 👉 Read it here: Does AI Hurt Kids’ Learning? | |
| 🧠 The “tutor, not cheat” prompt I made you Reading about it is one thing, but you need a way to actually do it. So I made you the exact prompt I use at our kitchen table. You paste it into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, fill in four blanks (your child's name, age, what they love, and today's topic), and it turns any chatbot into a patient tutor. The whole point of it is hints, not answers. It never hands over the solution, it pitches everything at your child's age, builds the questions around what they're into, and gives you a short progress note at the end. It's a way to keep them ticking over for the next eight weeks without it feeling like school, and it's the "good" version from that Norway study in a copy-and-paste box. Completely free 👇 | |
| 🤸 I froze an entire trampoline park with Mateo Not everything this week was about homework. You'll know by now I can't leave AI video alone 😄, so this week I fed one photo of Mateo (8) into Seedance. One photo, one prompt, fifteen seconds. The kids thought it was really cool (especially given the fact we were just as a trampoline park during the week). It's the other side of the same coin as the Norway story: AI is genuinely brilliant for making something playful and creative together. It's the homework-shortcut use that's the problem, not the tool. 👉 Watch it, and grab the exact prompt to make your own, here: https://www.aitoolsforkids.com/projects/ai-time-freeze-video-with-your-kid | |
| It all comes down to one question I now ask at home: did you think, or did you copy? Get that right and AI is a study partner, not a shortcut. Have a great rest of your weekend and see you next week! Niall P.S. Same idea, different format: QuizLab now matches a quiz to your child's exact school year, so over the break you can shore up what they learnt this year or give them a peek at what's coming next. Hints, not answers, as you'd expect: https://www.aitoolsforkids.com/quizlab | |
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