In a classroom in South Shore, Matthew Uriosdegui grabbed a pencil and a worksheet and started a brainstorm with his friends. The 8-year-old was trying to figure out which lyrics and instruments to include in a song to celebrate the last day of an after-school program at their youth center.
Beatboxing with his group, Matthew pitched creating a rap. The group agreed, and together they penciled in answers to fill-in-the-blank questions. They settled on a “groovy” piano tune about an island party with balloons and cake.
The instructor, Dallas Godina, collected the worksheets, popped open his laptop and typed the students’ handwritten notes as a prompt into Suno, a music composition tool powered by artificial intelligence. Soon, Matthew was listening to a few versions of his song produced by the AI tool, deciding which one had the right vibe.
“Oh, I like this one,” Matthew said, snapping along to the track.
Matthew is among several hundred students who have participated in after-school programming through the startup Overture Games, which prioritizes using paper and pencil to teach students AI skills. So far, the company founded by two recent Northwestern University graduates is working with 36 schools and youth centers across Illinois, plus another 18 in Massachusetts.
Overture offers one of the few formal programs aimed at helping younger children build foundational skills to effectively use AI, a sector of education that is growing rapidly but that experts say lacks research to guide schools on how best to teach it.
Cofounders Aspen Buckingham and Steven Jiang believe their company’s approach to teaching AI is ahead of the curve. They say exposing kids to an important technology while limiting screen time creates a better learning environment. And they say having children handwrite prompts and allowing only instructors to input information into systems like Google Gemini or Runway AI is the key.
“As soon as they hear that kids are not directly introduced to AI tools themselves, meaning putting their hands on it, just doing whatever they want with it, that is the definition of safety to schools and parents,” Jiang said.
Still, experts disagree about the best ways to introduce young children to the constantly evolving technology. That’s compounded by uneven access to this kind of education. And a look into the classroom shows that students who are exposed to AI do not necessarily even grasp what artificial intelligence is.
Northwestern grads launched AI classes as demand soared
Jiang and Buckingham studied music at Northwestern and initially created Overture in 2022 as an online tool to help children learn to compose music.
But as the AI industry took off, and Jiang and Buckingham saw the schools they were working with struggling to teach AI, they pivoted.
“You could feel this sense of huge fear and anti-innovation approach coming from the school, not because they don’t think it’s a great technology, but because they don’t know how to introduce it to the students,” Jiang recalled.
A 2025 report from the RAND Corporation, a research group, found that more than 60% of middle and high school teachers in core subjects like English, math and science are using AI at school. But elementary school teachers lag behind, with only 42% ever introducing AI in the classroom.
Little research exists on the best ways to teach young children in particular about AI and which skills should be prioritized, said Victor Lee, an education professor at Stanford University who helps high school teachers incorporate AI skills into their lesson plans. He thinks elementary schools should teach kids to use AI only if “there was a really valid and productive instructional purpose tied to important learning goals.”
Lee said Overture may be missing the mark with its emphasis on teaching children how to direct AI by writing out statements.
“The question we have to ask is: Is prompting the most important skill to learn? I would say a lot of AI literacy experts say no,” he said.
As a secondary focus, Overture also teaches students about common mistakes that AI tools make. Lee said he thinks those types of conversations are more valuable than encouraging young kids to actually use AI tools.
Benefits and drawbacks to paper-and-pencil approach
At the Rebecca K. Crown Chicago Youth Center in South Shore, “Real or AI” is a favorite game among the students in Overture’s after-school program.
The program teaches students how to distinguish between a photo captured on a camera and an image created by AI, and they like testing their skills.
On a recent Monday, Godina opened his laptop, showed students various images, and they started looking for clues.
Matthew walked up closer to the computer to examine an image of a piano. He noticed music notes on the sheets, rather than scribbled writing, a precise detail that he said likely meant the photo was real. He was correct.
Through Overture’s classes, Matthew also learned that AI struggles to create realistic body parts and often adds more lighting than it should. And while creating his own video game, Matthew realized that AI currently struggles to deliver a quality output if a prompt contains misspellings. Since then, Matthew said his spelling has gotten “25% better.”
“Sometimes AI makes mistakes,“ Matthew said. “It’s just a tool.”
While some experts, like Lee, would prefer young students learn about AI as a concept, rather than use it themselves, Elizabeth Radday of EdAdvance, a nonprofit that supports public schools in Connecticut, said a hands-on approach can help students retain information. She thinks it’s important for kids to create with AI, not passively absorb it.
“There’s a big difference between kids that are doing things to create a final project, versus clicking through something and just watching videos, or learning about AI through watching someone else do it,” Radday said.
In Overture’s classes, students often work in groups to draw characters by hand and write prompts describing them. Along the way, students tweak their prompts for the AI tool to get their image or video closer to what they envisioned. By the end of the 10-week course, students have created an entire imaginary world or interactive game.
To Godina, the ultimate goal is that students are “learning how to work together, learning how to discuss and communicate their ideas, and then also explain their ideas.”
Radday said she sees promise in Overture’s approach.
“If you love gaming and want to create your own games as a fifth grader, that used to be a really high-level skill that was not accessible,” she said. But now, AI tools can help a second grader do that. “That’s where we really think about AI extending and accelerating what kids can do, not just replacing critical thinking.”
Still, just because kids know how to use an AI tool for a project, doesn’t mean they really comprehend what AI is and what it can do more broadly.
At the Crown Youth Center, third and fourth graders who participated in Overture’s after-school program could explain how their main character, a blue bunny, defeated the evil “cactus cat” in the world of their AI-generated game.
But in the same class, most students couldn’t answer the question, “What is AI?” beyond describing it as “fake” or “not real.”
Uneven access to AI education raises demand for after-school program
Though AI education is booming, a student’s access to this instruction often depends on how wealthy their school district is.
Other recent research from RAND found that 43% percent of low-poverty districts said they had trained teachers on how to use AI. Meanwhile, only 6% of high-poverty districts reported training their teachers. AI education is often pricey and requires support from adults who have already learned how to use it.
That disparity is partly why leaders at Chicago Youth Centers wanted to partner with Overture.
Devin Swift, who manages science and technology programming for Chicago Youth Centers, said the question isn’t whether their students should learn about AI, but how to make sure young people from the under-resourced communities they serve have access.
“AI is up and coming. I think it’s important for young youth, especially Black and Brown youth, to know what it’s about,” Swift said. “So that when they get out into the world, they have all the tools necessary to be good adults, to be in the workforce.”
Overture offers AI classes at multiple Chicago Youth Centers, all of which are funded by grant programs and free to families. Most of the time, though, parents are paying for Overture’s AI programs. A 10-week program costs about $300, while single-day summer classes cost $120.
Overture partners with 38 schools across Illinois and Massachusetts. Of those, 27 are private schools, according to documents provided to the Sun-Times.
Nationally, private high schools are more likely than public ones to provide students and teachers with access to AI tools, according to a 2025 report from the College Board. And public high schools serving a higher share of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch are the least likely to have policies in place for AI use.
Buckingham, the Overture cofounder, said it took the company “a little more time” to form partnerships with public schools, but as the startup expands, they’re taking on more as clients.
Students bring AI skills, and interest in screens, home
Parents at schools offering Overture’s program have generally supported teaching AI to younger children, according to half a dozen parents and educators who spoke with the Sun-Times.
Alice Raflores, a parent at Longfellow Elementary School in northwest suburban Buffalo Grove, said she signed her second grader up for the after-school classes as soon as spots were available.
“When he saw the flyer for different enrichment programs, he saw ‘AI,’ he saw ‘games,’ and he’s like, ‘Mom, I want to do this one!’”
A manager at a tech firm, Raflores said her son, Michael, has seen her use AI for work and personal projects, and she wanted him to safely learn how to use the technology with barriers enforced by trusted adults. She liked that through Overture’s program, her second grader was collaborating with peers in a classroom setting and practicing his handwriting.
“I see it as teaching him that there are tools out there that can assist him in doing other things, but it is one tool of many,” Raflores said. “These tools are going to be part of our child’s lives, and exposing him in a fun way, which was still also involving his own creativity, his own writing, I felt comfortable with it.”
Maggie Wurzbach, a parent at St. John Berchmans School, a Catholic school in Logan Square, said Overture’s AI classes piqued her 10-year-old son’s interest in understanding how the coding for AI works.
“His creativity and his desire to learn things and ask questions increased by taking that class,” she said.
But his interest in computers has also grown. Overture’s reliance on paper-and-pencil learning did not resonate with her son outside of the classroom.
“That’s where parents have to set up the safeguards and the expectations,” Wurzbach said.
Raflores noted a similar caveat for her second grader.
“The moment he comes home from those classes, he’s like: ‘I want to do AI, I want to build something,’” she said. “I have to encourage him to not start there.”