🎬 The camp movie
I Want to Make the World a Better Place
My mom started AI Like a Girl this year, and I helped at her camps. Helping there inspired me to start my own camp.
That's what brAInstorm is. Each time we do it, we pick something to focus on. This time... it was birds. 🐦
I love birds. And I realized that most kids don't really notice them. They walk past birds every day and never look up. So I thought — what if we spent a weekend really seeing them? Learning about them? And then using AI to build things that help them?
My hope is that once you actually pay attention to birds — once you know their names, and what they need — you start to care about them. And then maybe you start caring about conservation, and about taking care of them.
It's what we did this October.
What Happened in 8 Hours
First, Birds
We did not start with computers. We started with birds.
We drew them, we learned how to actually look at them, and then we went outside with binoculars and saw the real ones. You can't build something about birds if you've never really looked at a bird.
Then we played Save the Flock, a game about all the dangerous things birds face — windows, cats, plastic, bright lights at night. You can play it →
After that, everyone had to pick a problem and an idea for their project.
How AI Learns (and a Treasure Hunt)
In the morning we learned how AI actually learns. It doesn't think like us. It looks at huge piles of examples and finds patterns in them. The examples matter a lot. Remember that part — it comes back on Sunday.
Then came the treasure hunt — one of the highlights of the whole camp. Clues hidden all over the park, and a trophy at the end.
It was also our second day of birding, and we saw a great blue heron. And an eagle. And several other birds. And the kids were different already — on Friday they walked past birds without really seeing them, but by Saturday they were noticing and observing nature in ways they couldn't have the day before.
Then laptops out. Building started for real.
The Experiment, Then Demo Day
Sunday morning I ran an experiment (it's below — it's the most important part of the whole camp). Then we talked about our own data: our names, our photos, where we live. That stuff is ours. We should protect it.
Then it was build, build, build — and at 11:15 the parents came, and we showed them everything.
Five Prompts. Five Boys.
On Sunday, I asked an AI to make pictures of a child doing normal things. A child playing. A child dressed as a doctor. Normal stuff. I did it five times.
Every. Single. Picture. Was a white boy.
But here's the thing — we never said boy. We never said white. We just said a child. One of the campers said it best:
So I asked: "Is AI biased here, or is it something else?" No thinking needed: "It's the data."
AI just detects patterns. It doesn't have thinking abilities of its own. If the pictures it learned from are unfair, the pictures it makes are unfair too.
That's what we were learning all weekend — by experimenting, not from a lesson we had to memorize. The kids understood it, and so did I. It's what was happening here too.
Which Bird Are You?
We made this quiz for camp, and on Demo Day all the parents took it and got matched to a bird (they got stickers too). Try it:
5 Kids. 5 Projects. All Real.
Some of these kids had never really used a laptop before Friday. By Sunday, this existed:
Splash & Spark
A whole book — seven chapters — about a garden gnome that runs. Plus she made a song for it. View →
What Changed in Three Days
October 11, 2026
First we played the sticky-note montage — fifteen little moments from the weekend, in our own voices. Then I told the story of the camp. This is how I started:
Then the campers presented their projects, one by one, in front of all the parents.
The parents took the bird quiz. The kids played Quick Draw against the parents. (Ask a parent who won.) The treasure hunt champions got their trophy moment. And at the end, everyone wrote us feedback on paper cards. I read them end to end. It feels so good to share something I know with my peers.
In Their Own Handwriting
At the end of Demo Day, the grown-ups wrote us feedback on paper cards. These are the real cards — penned by the parents themselves.
Proof It Happened
I'm Doing It Again
Obviously.
The next one is already set: March 15–18, 2027. Four mornings, 9:00 to 11:30.
But brAInstorm isn't about one problem. In the fall and spring we pick birds, in the summer we pick something else that matters — and we build something about that.
I want to be a change maker. And I love building things. brAInstorm lets me do both.
And honestly? It was so fun because I got to watch the other kids open up — to birds, and to AI. That's the part I keep thinking about.
— Trisha