Tech & Building
Schools Are Doing the Calculator Thing Again
Schools want to ban AI the way they once wanted to ban calculators. Meanwhile my ten-year-old runs two animal-facts sites and reads every night — because we built him an app that turned reading into a game.
When pocket calculators first arrived, plenty of teachers wanted them banned. Kids needed to learn to calculate by hand, otherwise they would never understand the real principles. We know how that story ended.
Calculators did not make mathematics irrelevant. They became another tool — and the people who learned to use them early simply moved faster, spending their time on harder problems. We are watching the same thing happen with AI.
“Dad, ask your AI about this”
My son is ten. Of course he needs to learn to read, write, calculate and think for himself. But I do not believe the most useful thing he can learn right now is the dates of old kings, or whatever else a textbook has decided is important this week. Those facts take seconds to look up.
What matters much more is that he becomes comfortable using AI properly — the same way earlier generations became comfortable with calculators, computers and search engines. Not as a toy. As a real tool.
It still frustrates me when he comes home repeating negative things about AI that clearly started at school, where AI is often presented as cheating, dangerous or something children should stay away from. I have been trying to turn that around. These days he walks up to me and says: “Dad, ask your AI about this.” That shift took some work, but it stuck.
He already runs two public animal-facts sites, funwildfacts.com and djurfakta.com, with thousands of visitors each month and no paid marketing. Not bad for a ten-year-old.
The reading app we built instead
From school he got the usual pile of reading leaflets for ten-year-olds. Neither of us found them especially interesting. So we solved the problem ourselves.
On the side, we built a small local reading app around the same interest in animals. Every evening he opens it and presses a button, and the AI generates a new animal and a short story for him to read. If he gets stuck, another button reads the text out loud.
He earns XP, keeps a reading streak going and unlocks Pokémon-style collector cards for every animal he finishes. He uses it every nights before bed because he does not want to break the streak.
He still practises reading — but now he reads about something he actually cares about, and at the same time he is learning that technology can be used to build something useful around a real problem. That lesson is probably more valuable than the app itself.
The gap that is actually forming
The gap forming right now is not mainly between smart kids and less smart kids. It is between the ones who learn to use these systems with real precision and the ones who only ever chat with them.
Anyone can type a question into an AI tool. The real skill is knowing what to ask, how to give it the right context, how to question the answer, how to verify it and how to turn it into something useful. That difference will compound for years.
Schools should absolutely teach children to think for themselves — to recognise bad information, weak arguments and confident nonsense. But that is an argument for teaching AI properly, not for pretending it is going away.
I am not waiting for the school system to catch up.