AI in education is a problem, says Code Ninjas CEO Navin Gurnaney. But it's not cheating. Rather, it's passivity.

getty

In a Study.com survey released just after ChatGPT went viral, 89% of college students said they’d used it for homework, 48% for an at-home test, and 53% to write an essay. Three years later, it’s unlikely those numbers have gone down.

But those probably aren’t the numbers we should care most about. The scarier number is the percentage of kids who now just automatically reach for an AI chatbot before even try to solve a problem on their own.

That’s the actual problem inside the AI-in-education panic according to Navin Gurnaney, CEO of Code Ninjas, the world’s largest kids’ coding franchise.

"If kids are being taught or being steered in the direction of, 'Hey, this is a cool tool you can just use and you’ll get the answers,’ and that’s what you see most kids doing, then they learn nothing," Gurnaney told me on the TechFirst podcast.

The solution, Gurnaney says, is to get kids building with AI.

"What is an LLM? How does it work? How do you create an image in AI? What is a sensor? How do you visualize this data?" Gurnaney says. "Through all these activities, they learn the fundamental principles."

From this perspective, the divide in education isn't between kids who use AI and kids who don't. It's between kids who consume AI and kids who build with it.
One group is outsourcing their learning. The other group is turbo-charging their own education.

AI is forcing tough discussions, and not just in education. Oracle announced layoffs. Snap announced layoffs. Cisco just shared more, on the same day the company had record earnings. The drumbeat of AI-attributed job cuts has gone from quarterly to monthly to weekly, which means that parents could be both worried about their own jobs as well as what will be available for their kids in the future.

Gurnaney’s answer is to be part of the change.

"If you're just following AI and just using it and being a passive consumer, then you certainly place yourself at a great disadvantage," he said. "That's the fear that people should have, that I could be completely marginalized. Whereas if you know how to create with it, now you're leading. Now you're telling AI, setting the stage. That job will never go away."

So what does a future-ready kid look like in the age of AI?

Gurnaney’s answer wasn’t about prompt engineering or even really about technology. It was about a pretty old-fashioned character trait: grit.

"Among the top three or four skills that differentiate people who don’t make it and people who do, grit is certainly one of them," he said. The foundational stack he described: critical thinking, logic, problem-solving, communication, adaptability and the ability to fail at something and keep going.

AI literacy — including actually understanding what an LLM is and why it sometimes confidently lies to you — sits on top of that base.

I ended the podcast with a question: if parents are only going to do one thing right now, what is it?

"Start early," Gurnaney said. “AI is here, and it's going to be everywhere in the future. So instead of getting intimidated themselves or keeping their kid away from AI, thinking it's evil or dangerous, you need to get close to it and understand it.”

Gurnaney told me about a 9-year-old boy named Adam in a Georgia-based Code Ninjas. He walked out with his arms up, shouting "I am sensei today" because he’d earned the right to start teaching the 6-year-olds. His mother, watching from the parents’ waiting area, had tears in her eyes, saying that her child felt like Superman that day.

With the rapid growth of AI, we probably need more Supermen and Superwomen.