This is what the weeks actually look like — from the first conversation about what they’d like to make, to the day it goes live on the internet.
No stage of it is a surprise. That’s rather the point.
Wondering what coding lessons for children actually involve? This isn’t those. This is vibe coding — your child describes what they want in plain English and directs the AI to build it. No coding, no Python, no syntax. What follows is what that actually looks like, week by week.
The work is not the typing. The work is the thinking.
Not a syllabus, and not a term. One real project, chosen by your child, carried all the way through to finished.
Ten to fifteen weeks is an honest estimate rather than a promise — a focused site might land sooner, an ambitious app with several features will take longer. We’ll give you a straight guess at the Discovery Meeting once we know what they want to make, and because you pay week by week, nothing rests on that guess being exact.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.Alan Kay
Every project is different, but they all move through the same five stages — and knowing them in advance is half of what makes a young builder calm when things get hard.
One thing to understand about all five: the thinking never stops. These stages describe where the weight sits at each point, not phases that close behind them. Planning isn’t step two of five — it runs the whole way through, and the building is the execution of thinking that has already been done properly.
We sit down together and work out what your child actually wants to make. Not an assigned project — their idea, or one from the Builders Menu that genuinely excites them.
That choice matters more than anything else that follows. Nobody finishes a hard project about something they don’t care about.
This is the part that surprises people. Before any building starts, your child sketches, argues with their own idea, changes their mind, and plans what every part of it should do.
On paper, on a whiteboard, in Excalidraw — and increasingly in conversation with AI as a thinking partner rather than a machine that hands out answers.
Nothing gets built until the vision is clear, because the finished thing can never be better than the thinking behind it. That is true of the first week and it stays true of the last.
Now the plan turns into something on a screen. Your child describes what they want in plain words, directs the AI to make it, looks at what came back, and decides what to change.
Then again. And again. Piece by piece, the thing in their head starts existing outside it — and you’ll hear about it at home, because at this stage they can’t not talk about it.
That loop runs dozens of times across a build. It isn’t a lesson plan — it’s simply how everything real gets made.
And notice where it starts. Not with a keystroke — with an idea. Every single lap round that loop begins with a decision about what should happen next, and that decision is your child’s. The building is what carries it out.
Something stops working. A feature turns out harder than it looked. The version that ran perfectly last week suddenly doesn’t, and nobody can immediately say why.
This happens in every build ever made, including mine. It is not a sign that anything has gone wrong — it’s simply the middle of the work.
In fact there are only two certainties in a build, and it is worth knowing both before you start. The first is that this will happen — not might, will, in every project, to every builder. The second is that we get through it.
That second one is my job, not your child’s. When the direct route is blocked, working out the way round it — a different approach, a different tool, the same idea built a simpler way — is the part I bring to the table. It is what twelve years of teaching and eleven months building a system nobody had built before actually amount to: a long education in not being stopped.
This is the stage the whole club exists for. Not the typing. This.
So your child sits with someone who has been stuck in exactly that way many times, who is completely unbothered by it, and who will keep finding another angle until it moves. Slowly, they stop being frightened of the hard part.
And that is what they carry out of the door. Not the website. The discovery that being stuck is temporary, that problems have ways round them — and that they are the kind of person who finds them.
The final weeks are testing, tidying and fixing the small things — then it gets hosted properly, at its own address, and it exists.
They open the letter they wrote in week one. Then they send the link to their friends, their grandparents, anyone who’ll look.
Ask anyone who has ever built something: that feeling doesn’t fade.
Nobody learned piano from a book. They learned it sitting beside someone who could play.
We set no homework and we never will — but most builders carry on thinking about it anyway. Ideas at odd hours. A feature they suddenly want. A problem they’ve been turning over on the bus.
Then they arrive on the day with all of it — and that is what the two hours are really for. We talk it through together and carve a path that is actually doable: what to attempt now, what to simplify, what to leave until they are stronger. An ambitious idea gets turned into a route with steps on it.
It stops being something they attend and becomes something they’re making — which is an entirely different relationship with a young person’s own time.
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.Proverb
There’s no year to sign up to and no term to see out. When a build is done, one of two things happens — and both are genuinely fine.
They took an idea in their head and made it exist on the internet. That’s a real achievement and a fine place to finish. They keep the build, the design file, and the knowledge that they can do it.
The second build is braver than the first, because they’re no longer wondering whether they can. By the third, they’re attempting things they’d never have dared in week one.
Finished is a feeling most children never get to have.
They built it, so it belongs to them — and it goes with them whenever they leave.
Come to a free Discovery Meeting with your child, bring whatever ideas they’ve had, and we’ll talk through how we’d actually build it — step by step, week by week.
📞 Ring Khalid — 077 20 90 90 90Sit down with Khalid, see the studio, and find out exactly how the club works. Best of all — bring your child’s ideas. If they’ve already landed on one, mention it when you ring and I’ll have thought about how we’d build it before you arrive. And if they haven’t got one, that’s just as good a place to start — working it out together is the first thing we do.
It’s relaxed, it’s free, and nothing is sold at it. Most families leave simply knowing a lot more than when they arrived.
Prefer to talk first? Ring Khalid — you get me, not a receptionist. A friendly chat, no obligation, and I’ll answer every question you have honestly and in plain English. Ask me anything. Rather write? Email hello@aibuildersclub.co.uk.
Croydon studio · Ages 10–16 · Small groups, limited spaces
AI Builders Club · Croydon, London · 077 20 90 90 90 · hello@aibuildersclub.co.uk
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