AI has become close to ubiquitous, and the pressure to keep up with its progress is real. As it grows, many people think about how job security depends on one’s ability to prompt AI, almost as an attempt to stay above water. More and more job postings include prompting as a desired skill. Professionals across industries are being told, implicitly or explicitly, that knowing how to work a chatbot well is now part of staying employable. As a society, we are adjusting in real time to a tool that didn’t exist in its current form a few years ago, and the instinct to ensure our kids aren’t left behind is a reasonable one.
Even so, adjusting to AI and being AI literate are not the same thing. Understanding the nuances is essential, especially for the developing minds of children, who will shape our future society.
Prompting has evolved into the skill of asking an AI the right question, in the right way, to get the answers you want. Many kids are now comfortable opening ChatGPT and learning how to phrase a request so it gives them a better answer. It is a useful skill, and given the pace of change, an understandable one for schools to reach for first. But it is not quite AI literacy, says Elizabeth Tweedale, founder and CEO of Coco Coders, a live online coding education company for children ages six to fourteen, and mistaking the two may be one of the more consequential mistakes schools make in the next five years.
A Skill With an Expiration Date
Elizabeth spent years building AI systems long before most people had reason to think about them, and she says that if there is one thing history makes obvious, it’s that interfaces do not last. The way we interact with software today is rarely how we will interact with it in five years. Prompting conventions are a product of this specific generation of tools. They will shift as the tools shift, just as search engine tricks from a decade ago mean almost nothing today.
Teaching a child to prompt well is teaching them to be good at something that only scratches the surface of a system that will continue to evolve and integrate in the future. Failing to foster true literacy in these AI systems risks leaving those developing minds behind.
It’s a distinction Elizabeth built directly into how Coco Coders engages with its students. Rather than centering lessons on any single AI tool, the curriculum treats coding and computational thinking as the foundation, with the expectation that specific tools will continue to evolve alongside it.
What Actually Lasts
The competencies that outlast any specific tool are about understanding how a system works, questioning what it produces, knowing what information should remain private, and figuring out where human judgment still matters more than a machine’s output.
[NOTE: The framework below references UNESCO’s AI competency framework for students and current federal education policy discussions. Both should be verified with current sourcing before publication to confirm accuracy and avoid unsupported claims.]
People like Elizabeth are actively leaning into international frameworks for student AI competency and have begun moving in exactly this direction, treating AI literacy as more of a mindset than a tool skill, built around ethics, systems understanding, and the ability to create with AI rather than simply operate it. Policy conversations at the state and federal levels are heading in the same direction.
At Coco Coders, Elizabeth and her team have built an AI Literacy Stack, a set of questions kids learn to ask chatbots in order to gain more agency in the future of AI systems:
Understand. What is actually happening behind the interface? What is the mechanism working in the background that has taken my question/prompt and produced an answer?
Question. What could be wrong, missing, or biased in this answer? Let me double-check my answers and challenge the result it presented to me.
Protect. What information should stay private? Does certain information have regulations and guidelines around it as it’s presented to me?
Collaborate. What should I be contributing that the tool can’t? How can I contribute original thoughts and ideas to broaden the scope of the results?
Create. Can I turn this idea into something original? What makes something personal and unique to an individual, or classifies it as enacting intellectual ownership?
Reflect. Did this tool deepen my thinking, or replace it?
These six questions do not depend on a specific model, interface, or set of prompting tricks. A kid who has internalized and invested in them will be just as equipped to navigate whatever AI looks like in ten years as they are today.
Why This Matters Beyond the Classroom
The distinction between prompting and AI literacy has real implications for how the next generation shows up as employees, citizens, and decision-makers. A workforce trained primarily to prompt well is a workforce that has practiced getting answers quickly, not evaluating whether those answers are correct, complete, or fair. A society full of confident prompters who never learned to question their outputs is a society more vulnerable to misinformation and apathy.
Coco Coders was built to introduce students to the same underlying questions, understanding, questioning, protecting, collaborating, creating, and reflecting long before most of them will ever write a resume or draft a job prompt.
The Real Opportunity
The schools and companies getting AI literacy right are not the ones racing to teach the newest prompting tricks, Elizabeth says. They are the ones building frameworks flexible enough to survive the next five product cycles, because the tools, as well as the way AI tools are trained, will keep changing and the underlying skills will not.
Coco Coders is a company upholding the belief that what they teach compounds precisely because it doesn’t depend on any single AI product staying popular.
Prompting will continue to matter in the short term. It just cannot be the finish line. If schools teach an entire generation of kids that AI literacy means knowing how to ask AI the right question, Elizabeth warns, they will have taught them to be excellent at something that will stop being useful the moment the interface beneath them changes, and incapable of critically thinking for themselves.
Elizabeth Tweedale is the founder and CEO of Coco Coders, an education company that teaches children ages 6 to 14 coding and computational thinking skills that build the foundation for AI literacy. Learn more at cococoders.com.
