Is AI in education a disaster … or inevitable? We can easily see that AI is already changing education … but is it making kids smarter, or just more dependent?
In this episode of TechFirst, John Koetsier talks with Navin Gurnani, CEO of Code Ninjas, about how kids can learn to build with AI instead of simply asking ChatGPT for answers. They discuss why coding still matters in the age of vibe coding, how AI can actually strengthen creativity and critical thinking, and the foundational skills kids need to thrive in a future shaped by artificial intelligence.
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This episode of TechFirst is sponsored by Apprentice
Did you think AI was only for digital work? Nope … AI-native manufacturing is here. This month’s sponsor is Apprentice, which offers the first AI Agent built from the ground up for agentic manufacturing. Connects to all your systems, monitors everything, automates all your processes … but keeps a human in the loop. Check it out at apprentice.io.
Watch our conversation here:
Navin explains how Code Ninjas teaches children as young as 8 to understand AI “behind the curtain,” develop grit and resilience, and gain the confidence to create games, apps, and even entrepreneurial projects powered by AI.
The conversation also dives into:
- Why passive AI use puts kids at a disadvantage
- The mindset future-ready kids need
- AI literacy for parents and children
- How coding builds confidence and problem-solving skills
- Why adaptability may become the most important human skill
- The difference between using AI and leading with AI
If you’re a parent, educator, entrepreneur, or simply curious about the future of learning, this episode is packed with practical insights about preparing kids for an AI-driven world.
Transcript: AI & education … disaster or destiny?
John Koetsier: Is AI destroying education? Hello and welcome to TechFirst. My name is John Koetsier. We all saw the video of the grad who was scrolling through his ChatGPT history of how he managed to graduate. Well, everyone’s worried that AI is going to wreck a whole generation of kids, and my guest thinks that might be the wrong fear.
His name is Navin Gurnani. He runs Code Ninjas, where kids age five to 16 learn to build with AI instead of just asking it for answers like the rest of us. We talk about why coding still matters in the age of vibe coding. We talk about how to raise a future-ready kid, maybe a future-ready human, and the difference between kids who will be replaced by AI and the kids who will be running the show.
But first, real quick, this episode is sponsored by Apprentice, which offers the first AI agent built from the ground up for agentic manufacturing. Super cool. It connects to all your systems, monitors everything, automates all your processes, but keeps a human in the loop. Check it out at apprentice.io. Okay, here we go.
Super pumped to have you, Navin. Let’s get into all the stuff. I want to hit the big one first, because we’ve seen a bunch of news stories recently, and the consensus seems to be that AI can be a bit of a disaster for education. Kids are just asking AI any question and getting the answer. What’s your thinking about that?
Navin Gurnani: I think that is, in fact, a very important question. That is truly what we do differently, right? 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, as a matter of fact.
Whereas at Code Ninjas, what we do is introduce AI to them in a different way, make sure that it’s not a dependency. You start understanding it and start building with it, and you create curiosity and amplify their creativity. They truly get to understand sort of what’s behind the curtain.
And this anxiety is not entirely without reason. When we see kids depending completely on ChatGPT for answers, then they learn nothing.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Navin Gurnani: What we’re trying to do is, through the medium of AI and coding, help them build games, and it’s a gamification-type atmosphere.
So it’s also fun.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Navin Gurnani: But it allows them to understand the rules, the loops, the feedback. If this, then that. It gets their process, their mindset, going in terms of decision-making.
John Koetsier: What’s really interesting about what you just said is I’m developing with AI.
Who isn’t these days, right? I think the person who thinks, “Okay, vibe coding is you ask AI for a thing, it does a thing, you have a thing,” hasn’t done vibe coding right. Because you get into it, and I’m not saying your education is vibe coding, but there are probably aspects that are similar.
You get into it and you realize, “Oh, I need to know this. Oh, I need to know this. Oh, there’s this dependency. Oh, I have to figure out this part.” Exactly. There’s this whole world that unveils in front of you, and you have to work on it.
Navin Gurnani: Yeah. We have kids that start as young as six and seven.
Not necessarily five and six. Those are our juniors. But when they start young, they really do develop this wonderful mindset of curiosity and understanding and confidence, frankly. It gives them the confidence that there’s nothing to be scared of. “I know how it works.”
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm.
Navin Gurnani: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
That’s a big thing that parents should really be keeping in mind.
John Koetsier: That is a super interesting point. I kind of want to double-click on that for a second, because there’s a ton of fear about AI right now, and that’s driven a lot by layoffs, right? Whether that’s Oracle, whether that’s Snap, the latest one, whether that’s others. People are thinking AI’s going to take all the jobs.
If you understand AI and you can use AI, you might invent your own job. I’m not saying everybody in the world can do that, but that is an interesting thing and a different perspective to give people on AI as well. You know, there’s a wonderful quote that I read a few months ago from somebody really smart at MIT, I’m sure, and it said, “The future will not be influenced by AI.”
Navin Gurnani: The future will be influenced by the modelers of AI. People who truly understand what is going on here versus—
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Navin Gurnani: If you’re just following AI and just using it and being a passive consumer, then you certainly place yourself at a great disadvantage. That’s the fear that people should have, that I could be completely marginalized, right?
Whereas if you know how to create with it, now you’re leading. Now you’re telling AI, setting the stage, and teaching people how to do things. That job will never go away.
John Koetsier: Let’s dive into what you’re teaching kids about AI, and then we’ll talk about parenting and their concerns and worries and all that stuff.
What are kids actually learning to do with you?
Navin Gurnani: We do cater to a younger group of people, right? Our programs are from age five to about 15 or 16. AI instruction or exposure really starts at about age eight.
They learn the fundamentals, the foundational skills. 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? Even writing with it, but with contribution, right? And what is coding all about? How do you build this game? What is robotics?
What that does is, through all these activities, they learn the fundamental principles.
John Koetsier: Hmm. It unleashes their curiosity because they’re having fun. It makes them want to do more and more and learn more and more. Then they learn logic, critical thinking, problem-solving.
One of the things that I really like when I talk to parents is that it teaches your kid grit and resilience, because you don’t succeed immediately, right?
Navin Gurnani: But you know that you will, and you try this and you try that. Almost learning to deal with failure so that you can succeed.
These are skills that are universal, whatever the job may be five or 10 years from now. Who knows? John, you may know this, but I don’t know what kind of jobs will exist 10 years from now.
John Koetsier: No, I don’t.
But if you have foundational skills and you have a basic understanding of what AI is, and we remove that intimidation factor, we give those kids a much better chance at succeeding in the future.
I love that you’re helping kids develop grit and determination. I’m pretty sure that’s the number one factor that determines whether kids succeed or fail, whether they can stick with it.
Navin Gurnani: Absolutely. We know that 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.
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm. Exactly.
The interesting thing about AI and coding is that, yes, you still have some failure. Yes, you have to think, “Oh, that didn’t work. I need to do this. Oh, I don’t like the look of that. I need to change this.” So you have that requirement for grit, determination, persistence.
But you get some early rewards much quicker than if you’re coding from scratch and you have to spend hours before you build “Hello World” or something like that.
So you get some results quickly, and you build momentum. That’s exciting.
Navin Gurnani: Yes. Yes. And at Code Ninjas, there’s a sensei for every five young kids. While they’re working at their own pace, there’s also an adult in the room that is there to help them and make sure that they’re succeeding as they go.
We have this belt system. They start as a white belt and go on to yellow belt and orange belt, all the way to black belt.
John Koetsier: Yes.
Navin Gurnani: As they progress from one belt to the other, they have this wonderful sense of accomplishment.
If we have time, I’d like to tell you this quick story. I was at one of our centers in Georgia, and I saw this nine-year-old boy coming out of the dojo with his arms up in the air saying, “Yes, I am sensei today.”
He goes to his car and brings out this blue jacket they’ve given him. This nine-year-old boy is teaching other six-year-old juniors, and his mother was in the parents’ waiting room watching.
I’ll never forget this. She literally had tears in her eyes, and she said, “You have no idea what you’ve done for this boy. He has a twin who’s the life of every party. He plays the guitar. He plays soccer. Adam, on the other hand, is a little bit inward-looking. He’s a little introverted. But now you make him feel like he’s Superman.”
I’ve seen this kind of transformation with so many kids. It really gives them confidence. They know that, “Hey, I know how this works.”
John Koetsier: Wonderful.
Navin Gurnani: They move into the world with so much more, certainly skills, but also confidence.
John Koetsier: Success is a powerful drug, and it’s a good one.
Navin Gurnani: Isn’t it?
John Koetsier: Yes, and it’s a safe one usually, so that’s a wonderful thing.
Let’s talk about AI literacy. What’s that mean at different age levels, like a 10-year-old versus a teenager, maybe even to parent level?
Navin Gurnani: The foundational skills we talked about, right? At age seven or eight, we’re not teaching seven-year-olds how to write an algorithm. It’s not about that. What we are doing is teaching them the foundational skills that they need to be able to write algorithms as they get older.
And I tell you, our black belt ninjas are leveraging AI to build games that they’ve sold on iOS and the Google Play Store.
John Koetsier: Nice.
Navin Gurnani: Imagine a 16-year-old or 17-year-old being able to sell all these games. It makes them tremendously confident.
It’s interesting that you bring up parents. We’ve actually had parents say, “When are you going to have this for parents as well?”
John Koetsier: No parent left behind.
Navin Gurnani: No parent left behind indeed. We’ve been discussing it, and who knows, maybe in the future we’ll probably have programs for parents.
But the way Code Ninjas is designed, it’s more for kids, with the slightly lower-level furniture, et cetera. I’m not sure too many adults are ready to come sit in those chairs.
But it is literacy for people at all ages. Not just that, right? The pitfalls as kids get older. If they start creating with AI, writing with AI, they need to understand that there are tools available for anyone to tell that you didn’t actually write this.
So what is it that you do? How do you make this your own? You can generate some ideas, use it as a tool, but how do you make it your own? That’s the kind of thing that we’re teaching kids at different levels.
John Koetsier: Absolutely love it. Just imagine you’ve got a teenager with their own iOS or Android game that’s published. Maybe that’s a future for them. Maybe that’s a career for them. Maybe it’s just a great thing to have on a resume. Either way, it’s a wonderful thing.
Navin Gurnani: We are actually talking to several corporate firms about providing opportunities for our ninjas and senseis to be interns with them.
John Koetsier: Nice.
Navin Gurnani: I’ve been surprised at how well that idea has been received. They’re very happy to talk to our 16-year-old ninjas and senseis because they bring so much that they already know versus somebody who’s never dealt with technology or AI or coding.
John Koetsier: Nice.
Let’s talk about coding in the age of vibe coding and AI-assisted coding. Where does it fit? How important is it? Is it still important at all?
I mean, we’ve all heard of the disasters of vibe coding, where you build something, it’s massive spaghetti code, there are bugs all over the place, or it works for five people but completely collapses when 50 or 500 or 5,000 people start using it.
Where does coding fit and sit today?
Navin Gurnani: I’ll tell you the Code Ninjas philosophy. We’ve stayed away from it.
The platform that we use for delivering our instruction is something we call Impact, and we’ve got a technology team that does use Coursera, et cetera, in the initial stages of coding.
But as far as our kids are concerned, we want them to learn the foundational skills. We want them to build it from scratch, if you will.
So we haven’t ventured into vibe coding yet. Now, will we never do that? I don’t know. Things are evolving so fast.
Honestly, two years ago we were focused only on coding, and we didn’t have any AI programs. Now we’ve got AI, we’ve got robotics, we’ve got game building. We’re now actually going into writing content for AI-assisted entrepreneurship for young kids.
Just to give them a bent of mind, right? To say, “What are the possibilities? What is possible today in this world where AI can almost act as a mentor and an idea generator for me?”
We’re writing content on that now.
John Koetsier: I think that’s amazing. I think there’s a lot that we need more of in our world today. We need more engineers. We need more builders.
Whether that’s builders who are building from scratch or building via vibe coding, we need more people like that. If we can get more startups going that are actually successful, that’s huge. Getting mindsets trained in that from their teens onward is also huge.
Navin Gurnani: That’s a pivotal thing.
You hit the nail on the head. If somebody were to stop me in an elevator and say, “Describe in three words or five words what you do,” I’d say we’re creating mindsets that these kids need to be successful in the future.
In a nutshell, that is what we are doing.
John Koetsier: Yeah. Frankly, we want every kid to have something like this. We want every kid to have this kind of opportunity.
Just imagine if every kid had this opportunity. The genius that we don’t know is there would come out. The ideas that would be developed and the businesses that would be created, the jobs and the wealth that would be created, would be absolutely off the charts.
I want to talk about a future-ready kid because I assume that’s what a lot of parents are thinking about and have concerns about, especially if they’re scared about AI. Maybe they’ve lost a job and AI was blamed for their layoff. That’s thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands.
Navin Gurnani: And more to come.
John Koetsier: More to come. Exactly.
So what does a future-ready kid look like?
Navin Gurnani: At the base of it are those foundational skills that we’ve already talked about: a mindset, a way of thinking about problems, critical thinking, reasoning, logic, grit, and even communication skills.
Our kids are presenting to each other and to their parents when they build a game. Like this boy Adam I was talking about, the kind of confidence he’s developed and how vastly his communication skills have improved.
That is the foundation.
Then, of course, we talk about giving them an understanding of how an LLM works.
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm.
That also gives them insight into when they get an answer. They understand why this answer is coming from where it is, or if sometimes ChatGPT is talking nonsense, they still know why it’s talking nonsense. They don’t always believe everything AI gives them. They’re literate enough to be able to see through that.
Navin Gurnani: They learn JavaScript and Python and about generative AI. They’re really able to adapt to any situation that the future may pose.
That kind of foundation gives them an advantage over being, you know, not literate, so to speak.
John Koetsier: Yes. Adaptability has got to be the key skill because the rate of change is just accelerating right now.
Being able to adapt and know that you can, and having confidence in your ability to do so, is really important.
Also, understanding when AI is spouting nonsense is really critical. Sometimes we’re not the smartest people in the world. We’ve followed GPS into lakes. That has happened more than once.
GPS is very confident, but AI is often very confidently incorrect. We need the ability to see through that. That is super, super interesting.
Okay, last thing, I think. If a parent does just one thing right now to prep their kid for an AI-driven future, what should it be?
Navin Gurnani: Start early.
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.
That’s how you prepare your kid for the future. You can’t make the road for the boy, but you’ve got to build the boy for the road.
If you get your kid ready and comfortable with AI, where they understand how things work behind the curtain—
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm.
Navin Gurnani: Then they’ll be able to face whatever comes in the future.
John Koetsier: Behind the curtain, wherever the wizard lives.
Navin Gurnani: Behind the curtain, yes.
John Koetsier: Love it. Love it. Thank you so much for this time, Navin.
Navin Gurnani: Thank you, John. It was a pleasure to meet you.