Five mornings at the Universidad de Alicante. From learning what AI actually is and how to work with it, to presenting fifteen projects that didn’t exist on Monday.
A 3D city you can walk around. A cooking game with recipes, a shop, and customers to serve. An illustrated encyclopedia of a world nobody had heard of the week before.
Here’s how the week goes.
Paper first
It starts with a drawing.
On paper: a world, a character, a game somebody has been carrying around in their head for a while. Paper is where you change your mind for free.
Then they photograph it, bring it into Spark, and ask for the thing they drew.
What comes back is close, or it’s wrong in a way that’s more interesting than close. The drawing is still sitting right there on the table next to it. That’s the whole trick: you can see where the machine misread you, because you can still see what you meant.
The comic at the top of this page started that way. Terence drew a robot superhero fighting a monster over a burning city, then built it in German. At the next table someone was working in Spanish, someone else in English. Everyone worked with the machine in their own language.
Then the rounds
The first version is never the final project.
Lara wanted a cooking game: chop on the board, grill the meat, plate it, serve the customer. Getting from that to Master Chef Jr took rounds. Change the ask, look at what came back, find the next thing that’s off. An instructor coaches those rounds one at a time, because a thin plan is always easier to spot from outside it.
Builders played each other’s games all week, half-finished. Nothing teaches you faster that your game is confusing. A ten-year-old handing your project back with “I didn’t know what to do” beats an adult telling you it’s great.
The vocabulary came last. Rewrite an ask four times to get what you wanted, and now you have a name for it: prompt engineering. The details you fed it, context. The drawing you started from, the input that shaped everything after. They’d been doing all three since Monday. Naming it is what makes it portable to whatever tool exists in five years.
Nobody builds for four straight hours
Nobody stayed in one place either. The morning moved: couches to talk an idea through, tables in the open space to build at, outside for the pool, back in for the pool table, the old retro arcade machine, a snack.
The break is what makes the next round work.
It cut the other way too. More than once, Builders wanted to come in from the swimming pool early to keep working. One left before the end of the week for a family holiday, and what upset him was that he couldn’t keep building.
Friday, Demo Day
Everything builds toward Demo Day, and the Builders know it from Monday.
They stood up in front of the families and took the room through it: who I am, what I made, why. For a few of them, that walk to the front was the hardest thing they did all week. Harder than any of the building. They did it, and every one of them had something that worked.
Then everyone played everything. Kids on each other’s games, parents on their kids’ projects, the room getting louder as it went. It felt like a demo night, not a school presentation.
That’s the moment your week of work stops being yours. Somebody else is holding it, poking at it, working out what you built, and you’re standing there watching them do it. Here’s what they were playing.
What they made in five days
Every one of these came out of somebody’s drawing. They were built in Spark, which we made for kids — the work stays in one place, it belongs to them, no accounts and no strangers in the chat. That’s why it could stay open all week for anyone to play.
From September, AI Kids Club also runs inside schools as an after-school activity. If that’s interesting for your school, it’s all on our schools program.
For families, the weekly program picks up in the fall.