Austin Scholar #167: How to use AI in your kid's summer
& advice from a Stanford freshman (summer projects edition!)
Hey, y'all!
This week from Austin Scholar...
Austin’s Anecdote: Advice from a Stanford freshman (summer projects edition!)
How to use AI in your kid's summer
Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…
I don’t have a lot of updates this week, which is amazing because of how busy last week was. Honestly, I’m still tired from having Big/Little week, my midterm, and Bay to Breakers all in one week, so this week was a much deserved “lock in and rest” type of week. It reminds me of something Sahil Bloom talked about on his book tour: balance doesn’t mean having a perfect ratio of work and play every day – it can come in waves, and that’s okay.
Austin’s Anecdote: Advice from a Stanford freshman (summer projects edition!)
On the note of doing cool and interesting projects over the summer, I thought I’d change up the questions I asked my Stanford friends to better fit the theme. This week, I talked to Ella Lan, one of my best friends here.
She is quite possibly the most accomplished person I know – she’s basically won every AI competition imaginable, written research papers on AI, worked with Stanford research, Jane Street, Citadel, MIT’s Research Science Institute, and will be an intern at Meta over the summer. I don’t think there’s anyone more qualified to talk about how to make the most of your summers while you’re young than Ella.
Here’s what I asked her:
What did you do over the summer in high school for work and what did you do for fun?
How did you balance enjoying your summer versus being productive?
Here’s what she said:
One big thing I used to do in high school was, even if we were on vacation, I’d take the first hour or two of the day to review a little bit of content that I knew I needed to go over for my classes. Just that small habit was really helpful for me.
I also feel like I genuinely enjoyed the work I was doing, so I never really felt burnt out. I hear people talking about burnout because they’re working so much during the summer or being super productive without giving themselves enough time for a break. Obviously, it’s important to give yourself a break—travel, relax, and do things that don’t require a lot of brainpower. But at the same time, if you genuinely enjoy what you’re doing, it feels a lot less stressful.
When you truly enjoy the things you’re doing, it allows you to do them better, and it makes you a happier person overall. You know, dedicating your summer to something productive is great, but if you genuinely don’t like what you’re doing, chances are you won’t be very good at it. So, my advice is to find something meaningful—something you enjoy and feel motivated to spend more time on. That’s probably my number one tip.
The best way to balance enjoying your summer and being productive is to make sure those two things aren’t mutually exclusive. If you can find that balance, it’s amazing.
How to use AI in your kid's summer
One of the things that I love about summer is that, while a lot of parents don’t care about their kids loving school (and believe that academics should just be a grind), they have the right attitude during the summer. They want their kids to both have fun and learn a lot.
One caveat on all this: “fun” as a creator and “fun” as a consumer are not the same thing. “Fun” as a consumer might look like mindless scrolling on TikTok – but that isn’t constructive for anyone (except maybe for the TikTokers who are making money off of your watch time). When thinking about summer fun, encourage your kids towards the kinds of fun that involve creating something. That’s what this week’s newsletter is all about.
I got a lot of great feedback from last week’s newsletter on AI songs, so I was inspired to come up with other projects that your kid can do over the summer to get comfortable with AI. Two people that I know have their kids constantly doing cool projects with AI are GT Mom and GT Dad.
So, I reached out to the two of them to see what they were doing with their kids over the summer.
Here’s what they said:
Vibecoding with Cursor. Here is GT Mom's oldest pictured doing just that. I believe she was creating a game, but your kids could build anything: a personal journal, a utility app, anything they can imagine. They could even use an LLM to come up with ideas for things to vibecode.
Using Canva to create posters to decorate their rooms and create informational signs for the house. Canva has added a ton of AI features recently – and kids love Canva.
Chat with an LLM. For more entry level type LLM usage, kids could chat with an LLM to plan the summer. They could include constraints like vacations or camps, any goals, and explain how their past summers went. Then, they can use Canva to create calendars and checklists to coordinate all of the events.
This isn’t a project but just a general parenting tip: GT Dad had given his 5yo ChatGPT and prefers that she uses it over a web browser in all situations because ChatGPT doesn’t give ads or slop or complexity, it just answers her questions. It’s a very good internet interface for children. It’s very good for early readers and writers.
You can also create a long-running LLM gen interactive story thread based on a show your kid likes (GT Dad’s daughter is doing this with Avatar the Last Airbender)..
Use it to set a summer goal. Suggestions for goals to have: build a treehouse, play Birds of a Feather on the guitar, start a video game YouTube channel, make $500 dollars, learn Japanese, and learn to draw manga. You can try to encourage your kid to have a goal that can be done alongside parents also. Here’s a user prompt:
“I am _________ years old and you are going to help me set a summer goal.
First, you will help me understand the work and motivation required to keep the goal. You will give me information and ask me questions to check to see how much I really want it. If I don’t want it enough, you’ll help me figure out another goal.
Second, you will assess the materials and resources I will need to achieve the goal, including costs and adult support, if any. You’ll help me find informational resources for free, and link to anything I need to buy. Keep it cheap.
Third, you will create a plan for me to achieve my goal, and a tracker and checkin routine for you to help me with obstacles. You’re my coach, so how often should I come to you and what should I tell you or ask you?
My goal is ____________.”
Now here are some additional quick projects or activities that I’ve thought of to help your kid have the best, most learning-filled summer yet:
Create your own version of Hamilton using SUNO for whatever subject they care about (e.g. a rock album of the story of photosynthesis, a musical about a different historical figure or time period, or an album of country songs for each chapter of one of your summer reading books)
Create a “choose your own adventure” game with Claude AI, replit, or Pycharm (I did this in sixth grade and had a ball creating a story about getting lost and trying to find a Jimmy John’s drive through) – even if your kid has no coding experience, AI makes this super easy
Use ChatGPT to create a murder mystery game. The Stanford figure skating team had an event last Friday where we were all given roles and had to embody them (I was the jealous ex) and talk to the other players to figure out who murdered the winner of the Grand Prix. ChatGPT can easily create the characters and the story – and you can add in requirements of specific science or math concepts and historical or literature knowledge to solve the mystery. This could be a super cute party idea!!
Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…
The new Marvel movie is easily my favorite movie of the year so far. The number one reason why? I don’t believe I’ve seen a more accurate representation of depression. The way that the character “Bob” fights against his depression “the Void” is exactly how I envisioned working through my problems back when I really struggled with depression. I actually felt like I was physically fighting with myself and felt the desperation of losing the fight as poignantly as Bob did. There’s also this idea of feeling trapped in your shame – of reliving a moment over and over again to torture yourself and feeling as though you can’t escape the darkness.
Thunderbolts is so, so real and if you don’t understand depression or simply mental health struggles in general, watch this movie. It’s also one of the only movies where there’s no other way to beat the villain than through the power of love and friendship :)
Math Academy proves that people who hold lifelong titles of “not a math person” can change their tune. The mastery-based mindset that the app enforces, along with breaking problems down into their smallest parts, allows anyone to break through their math capability “ceilings” and do increasingly advanced mathematics.
Even if you never considered yourself a math person, give Math Academy a try and see what happens.
My sports analytics class hosted the head coach for the men’s golf team at Stanford, Conrad Ray.
One of the things that Coach Ray talked about is that “data has made golf more of an art,” which couldn’t align more closely with my views on math and writing, as I talked about here. I’m obsessed with the idea that numbers and analytics make something more creative and beautiful instead of more structured and rigid.
Here’s what Coach Ray had to say: Your golf swing is like your thumbprint. For example, I could ask everyone here to throw their water bottle across the room. Everyone’s throw would look different, but the water bottle would still get across the room. That’s like your golf swing. By knowing the parameters of impact and the optimization of the ball and club interaction, you can make up the rest of it! You can create your own swing – it doesn’t matter how you get to the ball, as long as you hit it in the right place. In fact, Coach Ray said that when he’s scouting for golfers for the team, the first thing he’ll do is look for the most unique swing.
He also explained how, in the past, golfers were told to copy players’ successful swings, which made the sport a lot more copy-paste and didn’t allow a lot of creativity when learning. Now, however, you can have creative freedom over your swing, as long as you have the right data when hitting the ball.
Another win for the “analytics allow for creativity” team!
Thanks for reading. Go crush the week! See y'all on Sunday.