Why children must own their spark

How do we create the grounds for a spark to ignite? If we get it right, I believe the rest will follow

I was in the classroom for more than twenty years before moving into management roles, but I have learnt more about learning from my nine-year-son than I did from the thousands of students I taught over my career.

I think this is because I have been able to watch him grow in his interests, explore ideas, run down dead ends and ultimately latch onto a few things he loves. I’ve not pushed him in any one direction, just shown him things that interest me and seen what happens. My wife has done the same.

I’ve become increasingly interested in AI’s capabilities across a broad range of fields; but it is in coding that I have become fascinated. In a recent interview, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said that soon anyone will be able to spin up their own software without needing software engineers. I can vouch for that - my recent project, Skolr, is a full stack web application that enables teachers to share AI ‘skolrs’ (trained chatbots) with students. It has been entirely ‘vibe coded’: starting with Claude and finishing with Claude Code. I’ll be releasing it soon in beta.

Because of my interest, my son also became interested, and over recent months began to code games with AI. However, I noticed that he soon lost interest in vibing games, mainly because he could not see the process. He asked Gemini or Claude to give him the python for a particular game, added it to VS Code, and iterated. The bit in the middle was lost to him. But what this did do was open his eyes to the possibility that he could create his own games. And that has turned into a full scale obsession.

I introduced him to Godot and Cocos, two popular open source game design engines, but to be honest they were too complex, and YouTube videos not clear enough to follow, so he got frustrated and lost interest. But then something interesting happened. He’s been quietly gaining considerable expertise with Geometry Dash, an iPad game where you navigate geometric shapes through obstacles. He somehow worked out that he code create his own Geometry Dash game in Scratch. I guess he’d seen a related YouTube video. So he set about watching this series of videos and creating his own version of the game in Scratch.

The point of all of this has nothing to do with my son, or coding games, and has everything to do with why he is so motivated to build his Scratch games and not vibe code or build games with Godot (although I’m pretty sure in time he’ll go back to those platforms, or Unity). It is because he owned the spark to coding games with Scratch. It did not come from me, or his mother, or anyone else. He decided to do it from the start. And this has got me thinking about how we redesign our education system so that every child can own their spark—is given the time, space, freedom and trust to work out what it is that sparks them, and to be allowed to go for it and see where that takes them.

Adults are no different. I don’t vibe code because someone told me it was the thing I should be doing. I do it because it’s interesting to me: I like to explore how far I can push things using the AI tools we have. Anyone can drop a prompt into Lovable, Manus or Claude and it produce a reasonable digital artifact. But designing and building complex, full stack applications with tens of thousands of lines of code is hard work, even if Claude is doing the gruntwork. So I choose to do it because there is a spark inside me that is interested enough, and stubborn enough, to motivate me to keep going.

It’s the same with my son. He’s been at this project for days now, listening to an animated Scratch instructor (it helps that the videos are fun), building, testing, iterating. At one point the whole thing broke. I’ve noticed him get quickly upset when that’s happened in the past. Not this time. Because this is his thing, something he owns, he knew it was up to him to fix. So that’s what he did. I told him how proud I was of the grit he showed to sort the problem. He looked surprised: why wouldn’t he sort it? After all, he owned this so it was his challenge to overcome.

Of course, it’s not as easy as giving children total freedom and seeing what happens. They must be given strong foundations. Literacy, numeracy, how to use these tools in the first place, where to look for help: this is not about some free-for-all where we leave kids to/with their own devices. But once they have a degree of aptitude in key domains then we should trust them enough to find the things that genuinely interest them, as in working out their own way through can be tremendously beneficial.

One of the most powerful ideas I brought into a school was borrowed from Dr Nick Jackson, who created what he calls ‘genius hours’, where students down tools at any point in the week to engage in passion projects. In a week-long end of term project at the British International School of Tunis where I was Executive Principal, we allowed students afternoons to engage in their own passion projects, supported by AI. The atmosphere across the school was utterly changed. Students couldn’t actually believe they were allowed to do things they enjoyed. And as a result, produced some wonderful artefacts by the end. And learnt masses in the process.

We must recognise how profoundly AI is already democratising domain expertise. I am not a coder, but I can code. I am not a professional artist, but I can produce professional-looking art. The process may be different, but the end result is the same (at least to the untrained eye / person paying for my output). This will only continue—and what this means for education will be fundamental. I believe we will soon be able to worry less about ‘getting them through the course’ and focus more on creating the right conditions for creative expression to spark and flourish. I believe then that deeper learning will occur, as well as greater fulfilment, happier schools, and significantly improved behaviour.

We need to teach the basics. We must ensure our children are good communicators, good thinkers, and decent humans. I am not (contrary to recent comments I have received) somehow suggesting we throw away the need to learn stuff and delegate our thinking brains to AI. But, to be perfectly frank, our children’s brains have been atrophying for years. Dull, irrelevant worksheets, dog-eared textbooks, and death by PowerPoint: they deserve better.

So as we explore the ‘what next?’ with our education system, let’s start by asking this one, vital question: how do we create the grounds for this spark to ignite? If we get it right, I believe the rest will follow.