Explore the exciting possibilities of AI and education with Elena Zarnovsky. In this insightful episode, we delve into her vision of making complex subjects like computer science accessible to homeschool families. Learn about her comprehensive courses on digital literacy and how parents can easily incorporate these valuable lessons with minimal time investment.
TJ Pander here with you with KLZ Radio, and I’m here with Elena Zarnovsky. She does a lot of STEM work. She’s got a great book coming out, and she wants to talk to us a little bit about that. And with Computer Science Education Week coming up December 8th to 14th, you can find a lot of stuff on klzradio.com about this as well. Elena, welcome to the show. How are you today?
SPEAKER 02 :
Great. Thanks so much for having me.
SPEAKER 01 :
Awesome. We’re proud to have you. And this is super cool what you’re doing, especially for our homeschool families. So tell us a little bit about you’ve got a book coming about coming out. You’ve got a website that folks can check out with a lot of really great tools that homeschool moms and dads can use for their kids. So let’s talk about it a little bit.
SPEAKER 02 :
Absolutely great. Thanks again. Super happy to be here. So a little bit high level about my background. I spent 15 years in tech before I became a mom. But then when I became a mom, I decided to stay home and raise my kids. And when I was home, I started to shuffle around online during nap time and started taking some online courses. ended up taking one from HarvardX, believe it or not, Introduction to Computer Science. And it was so fun for me, even though I had this pretty healthy professional experience in tech, I just loved diving into computer science. And I thought to myself, I need to make sure I teach these ideas to my kids. So I started playing around with ideas, how to, you know, put together curriculum around computer science. Obviously, my children were babies at this time. So around five years old, I started introducing these concepts that led to me realizing I must teach them also about financial literacy. So I built a financial literacy course. And then last year, because it’s been, you know, something that’s prevalent in the digital world today, I built a course on AI called an AI workshop. So this last year, I’ve taught these courses online for the last three years virtually and at local community centers. They’ve been a hit. They’ve really grown. I even got some press in the USA Today for the work I’ve done. So I’m really excited. But last year, I decided I would like to put all of my course content since I’m only one person can only teach so many students at once. What if I put everything I’ve ever taught into a book format? So I spent the whole year working with a publishing company as well as a bunch of digital creators. And we have created that. I call it a next gen playbook for Parents of Alpha Generation on AI, digital literacy, financial literacy based on the course I call Money Wise, as well as character development and goal setting course that is another course I teach called Goal Getter.
SPEAKER 01 :
So there’s a lot more that you’re doing than just technology. This is kind of like a total form thing for homeschool parents. Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
100%, it’s comprehensive. Like I said, I started with the goal getter and then I love computer science personally. I also was a math major before I got into computer science in undergrad. So this is just my wheelhouse. And my goal with the content, because sometimes I feel computer science, more techie subjects gets a bad rap. There’s a little stigmatism. My goal and the way I teach is to make complex subjects easy. I truly believe you can teach your kids at home in 10 minutes a week with the lessons that we prepared.
SPEAKER 01 :
That’s great. And if you’re a homeschool mom or dad sitting at home with your kiddos right now, if you check out kidlaboratories.com, there’s all kinds of outlines for courses and cool ideas for stuff you can do with your kids. Tell us a little about the website. What can homeschool moms use that for?
SPEAKER 02 :
OK, great. So there’s a bunch of tools there. First and foremost, you can learn all about my story and my husband, who also helps me. He’s MIT engineer, so we have a huge foundation of science background and tech and engineering. So he kind of helps me co-author some of the courses that I create. Also, I have a Smart Mom blog. So if you’re interested in tech subjects, tech is affecting every component of our world at this time. And so I write a lot about how that’s affecting education, how it’s affecting the economy, obviously, because I want to focus on maturing everybody’s understanding of finance and the financial markets. And then I write personal blogs about just parenting in this new time, just trying to collaborate on kindred spirits out there who want to know all they can, but also maybe even scaling back more tech use. Um, so that’s there as well as I would like to highlight on December 7th, um, at 7 30 PM Pacific, I’m hosting absolutely free webinar where I’m going to go over, um, the high level coursework in my book. future proofs kids so if anybody wants to attend we’d love to have them join i will be joined by a university of u coach for college prep denise barker she will also have maybe like 10 minutes in the hour-long webinar i would love for everybody to join us i’ll show you how i’ve written up the content as well as i don’t know if i mentioned this about my book my book i wanted to be a comprehensive tool that parents could just take and use at home and teach their kids I have a long introduction about my background, my faith, and my call to this new kind of world that we’re living in. And then I go in explicitly with each section on money, on digital literacy, and on character development and goal setting. And I created a about and how to. In this section, this is the fun part, I integrated QR codes, which is video lessons that you can watch with your kids. So the way I envision is this. You read that introduction, then you decide which topic you’re going to teach first. Say it’s financial literacy. You read the about and how to, explain how to talk to your kids about it. 10 minutes a week. I would like to do, I did this for my own son in first grade at seven years old after school on Mondays because he didn’t have any… practices you could also do it sunday night 10 minutes and then after you read the about now too click on the qr code watch the video together i’ll finish up real quick there’s also an associated workbook if you want to lock in the learning with a little mind body connection you just fill out the worksheet and you’re done 10 minutes a week
SPEAKER 01 :
that’s really awesome and that’s that’s such a benefit you know a lot of us here at klz are homeschool parents and we appreciate the the ease of use of a lot of stuff like this and i can tell you just from from browsing your blog you know a lot of times you go to a website and the blog is is kind of milk toast it’s not it’s not this is usable information guys if you get a chance go to kidlaboratories.com and click on uh more and smart mom blog and you’re going to see some usable information there um we’re going to have some extra information and hopefully elena is going to forward us the video from that december 7th webinar that we can include in our computer science education week on klzradio.com and that sounds like it’s just a wealth of information so check out the the book coming out future proof kids lots of courses that you can get in there and things like that but there’s so much uh ancillary information you can get from her website as well So I want to ask you, too, you kind of focus on AI and education, and that’s something we talk about on the station here a lot. It’s a political station, obviously, so we’re talking about a lot of the regulatory things behind it. Where do you see AI taking us in an educational mindset? Obviously, there was some trepidation to accepting it at first, but what do you see the positive, negative? What’s your overall take on it right now between you and your husband?
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, that’s such a good question. Okay. So AI is definitely a force to be reckoned with. And we’re going to see so much good that’s going to come out of AI. I’m bullish on AI, but I just went to a kind of a thought leader symposium this last weekend about AI. So AI is going to affect education. If you do have kids in public schools, even private schools, I want to let you know they’re already using AI every day. It might not be, you And so, but this is how, but this is a new, and so now it’s up to us as parents. This is what I’m really passionate about. We know this is coming and it’s AI education. I think it’s parallel to sex education in the 1950s where, okay, all of us kind of generally understand there might be some negative repercussions, but let’s lead with intention. And so what I’ve done in my personal home is I created a value statement over AI. So we have some personal family crest that has our mission statement and our values. But then I also put up, we posted it together, our value statement over AI and machine interaction is we value human relationships, personal relations over machines. And it sounds kind of silly and really future forward, but it’s really important. it’s really important to lead with that intention because what we’ve seen unfortunately over the last 10 years with social media we didn’t you know make the connection till later and I write about this in my book I call it the TYT or 10-year test so now that we’re aware we have very you know fall out with social media and we’ve seen really negative neurodivergences happening to kids because we’re hijacking their dopamine system by giving them these big responses. So now that we know that knowledge is power, so let’s lead with intention for AI. So it is going to be a co-intelligence. That’s the other thing we throw around in our house. It’s not codependence, right? It’s co-intelligence. We’re never going to lead with going to AI for anything in our home. However, we’re going to see it as a tool to boost whatever idea that we might have and then always take ownership. Right. You never would just leave knives out. So something that you’re going to control. But then you’re also here’s what I’m very passionate about, too. And this is what I wrote the course on AI workshop. It’s not teaching your children how to use generative AI. It’s the science behind it. Because honestly, the science is so darn interesting. The science behind AI is how literally did they get to teach a machine how to perceive? And perception is really based on your own unique experience. And so to me, that’s really fascinating. How do you get AI to understand and make representational connections? That’s how your brain works. And so I go over the big five of AI, which is perception, representation, reasoning, learning, and societal impact. And we have these really open conversations about all these things. The science is fantastic. The history is even more interesting. I do in my book, The Future Proof Kids, I do a deep dive into each section and the deep dive of the history of AI is so fascinating. It goes to like Greek roots and ancient Crete. So it’s one of those things that it’s so darn fun and so interesting. It’s really timely for us all as parents to collectively have this information. And I believe I, this is why I’m here. It’s really my call to, you know, from a higher power to be like, Hey, we need these tools. I think you can do it. And I just answered this call and I’m going to do it in a really palatable way. And parents are going to be really interested because it’s so cool and interesting. And you put all the pieces of the puzzle together, and then you now have the knowledge, empowering parents, and then they get to go share it with their kids.
SPEAKER 01 :
For sure. And there are so many misconceptions about AI at this point. It’s, you know, it’s almost laughable sometimes to hear some of the responses you get when you know the background.
SPEAKER 02 :
And that’s what happened to me in the class when I was teaching STEM in my local church school. I would ask people, like, what is AI or the students? And it would be like robots, avatars. And I’m like, oh, there was not. a real understanding the math plus code and infrastructure. And that’s the other big thing. The infrastructure, we’re building it on scale right now. And I’m not trying to get into minutiae here. It is in my book. But it’s really important to understand that. And there’s different ways to do it. There’s, you know, algorithmic efficiency. There’s just so much more to understand. And every single person in the world should have this understanding because this is the technology that’s going to shape our future. I’m not sure it’s going to take over like so many of us think it might with the super AI, you know. But I heard a perfect analogy, which I think this is where it will land, but I am no Oracle. Someone said the other night at our symposium that AI technology will be the same as aviation. So aviation, you know, is amazing. You and I can get on a plane. We can be anywhere in the world in any second of any day, right? That’s fantastic. however the financial markets monetarily it hasn’t been a huge gain right so i think i believe that ai will influence all of our lives we get to help seal the ship how much and what we want to adopt right we see negative influence with chatbots but i don’t think it’s going to be this thing that’s going to 100 take over or be this astronomical financial gain like some of the things are overvalued right now that’s another financial conversation So it’s just really fun to have these conversations, expose people that maybe didn’t or just a little apprehensive. I’m going to open the door for you wide open. I’m going to teach you everything I know, make it palatable, easy. And then now we all can decide where we want to take it together.
SPEAKER 01 :
That is absolutely wonderful. And guys, don’t forget, we’ve got December 8th to 14th, Computer Science Education Week is coming up. You’ll find some good digital content on klzradio.com. Please go to kidlaboratories.com right now. Elena, is there anything that a homeschool mom or dad sitting at home right now listening, what’s something they should do right now to check you out?
SPEAKER 02 :
okay uh check me out i want to give them a tip can i give them a tip they can go to kid laboratories.com at kid laboratories on instagram you find my content there but this is if anybody has any apprehension about computer science i just want to let you know you’re already doing it so a foundation of computer science is something called conditional statements this is if then else that’s how you write all computer programs so i know every single parent out there says if you brush your teeth then you can watch a show we have a if you can watch this can i watch the show checklist So, you know, really similar to Simon Says, you can play a robot game with your kids, write down the step-by-step instructions, you know, cluck like a chicken or do the gritty. I have sons, so they make me do little silly dances that they do in sports. Through that fun little exercise, you’re teaching your child a foundation of computer science, which is conditional statements. So what I want people to know is you can teach computer science at home. You can teach it with a pencil and paper. You can have fun with your kids and you’re probably already doing it. You just haven’t explicitly named it that. But now that you know, you can do it on your own. And please. you know, search me in kidlaboratories.com. Join me for the free webinar, go to my website for more content, and then look at the courses that I teach. And I’d be happy. And I’m so excited to teach next summer, all these courses to your kids directly too. If you don’t want to do that, pick up the book because it’s going to be such a good tool.
SPEAKER 01 :
So Elena, how can people reach you, get in touch with you? We’ve got your webinar coming up December 7th. That’s going to be on your website. I’m sure they can pick up your book. I think that’s releasing March of 26. So look out for that. Tell us all about it. How can they find you?
SPEAKER 02 :
So go to www.kidlaboratories.com, of course. All my content is there. You can book yourself for the free webinar. Also on Instagram at Kid Laboratories. You can find me there.
SPEAKER 01 :
Excellent. Elena, thanks so much for the hard work you’re doing for our homeschool families. And thanks for joining us today on KLZ Radio.
