One of the local community recreation and education programs just sent around their seasonal brochure which has many wonderful activities for children! Even many activities for children of the yam's age (nearly fourteen months).
And then you get to the STEM section and it's all “AI” projects.
The thing is, I can see how that would sound super cool and attractive to both parents and kids—the promise of getting to walk out of a program with a bunch of finished things like 3d models, song compositions, video games would in fact sound cool as hell to me if I was that age? But as a parent who is also a programmer it is driving me up a hecking wall. There is a “vibecoding” class. I hate it here.
I learned programming out of books when I was like, 8, which definitely had less exciting results. But it did teach me foundational concepts like iteration and conditionals and variables that I could apply to other languages as I grew up, and maybe even more importantly, I got to tinker with stuff and just... fuck around without having there necessarily be a Product. I made a bunch of stupid websites talking about how much I liked basketball and Cardcaptors and Sailor Moon and just tried stuff to see if it worked.
It just kind of sucks that kids are already being shilled this stuff from age 6+. I hope the yam is excited for vintage typing software and learning programming in a cave with a box of scraps.