SPEAKER 01 : 0:00

TJ Pander here with you with KLZ Radio, and I’m here with Elena Czarnowsky. 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 : 0:18

Great. Thanks so much for having me.

SPEAKER 01 : 0:20

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 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 : 0:35

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 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 students. 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 : 2:30

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 : 2:37

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 : 3:11

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 : 3:27

Okay, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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. So that’s there, as well as I would like to highlight on December 7th at 7.30 p.m. Pacific, I’m hosting an absolutely free webinar where I’m going to go over the high-level principles 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 want it 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. created 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. See, 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 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 and how to, 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 : 6:02

That’s really awesome. And that’s such a benefit. A lot of us here at KLZ are homeschool parents, and we appreciate the ease of use of a lot of stuff like this. And I can tell you, just from browsing your blog, a lot of times you go to a website and the blog is kind of milquetoast. It’s not This is usable information, guys. If you get a chance, go to kidlaboratories.com and click on More and Smart Mom Blog, and you’re going to see some usable information there. 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 book coming out, Future Proof Kids, lots of courses that you can get in there and things like that. But there’s so much ancillary information you can get from her website as well. So I wanna 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 : 7:14

Oh, that’s such a good question. Okay, so AI is definitely, you know, 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 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 and might not be, you know. 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 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 make the connection until 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 fall out with social media and we’ve seen… really negative neurodivergence is 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 intelligence 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 why i wrote the course on ai’s ai workshop it’s not teaching your children how to use generative ai it’s the science because honestly the science is so darn interesting the science behind ai is how literally did they get to um teach a machine how to perceive. Perception is really based on your own unique experience. To me, that’s really fascinating. How do you get AI to understand and make representational connections? That’s how your brain works. I go over the big five 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 : 10:41

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 : 10:50

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 a 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 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’ve seen 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 : 12:33

That is absolutely wonderful. And guys, don’t forget, we’ve got December 8th to 14th, Computer Science Education Weeks 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 : 12:52

Okay, check me out. I want to give them a tip. Can I give them a tip? They can go to kidlaboratories.com, at kidlaboratories 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 a, can I watch a 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. But 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. 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 : 14:21

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 : 14:33

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 : 14:44

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.

SPEAKER 02 : 14:49

Thank you so much, Reed.