Education Futures

Bethany Koby-Hirschmann is a designer, social entrepreneur, and co-founder and Chief Vision Officer of Fam Studio, a research and design practice based in Somerset, England. She holds a BA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice from the University of Bath, and is completing a PhD on youth co-creation and the uses of enchantment. In 2012, after finding a discarded laptop in a skip near her home in East London, she co-founded Tech Will Save Us with her husband, Daniel Hirschmann, on the conviction that children should be producers of technology, not just consumers of it.Tech Will Save Us grew into a STEAM company selling in 97 countries and partnered with the BBC, Microsoft, Samsung, and ARM to design the BBC micro:bit — a pocket-sized computer distributed free to a million UK children that has since reached more than four million users worldwide. After selling the company in 2021, Bethany founded Fam Studio, which co-creates with families and children to build technologies, learning content, and experiences centered on people and the planet. Current projects include a multimodal "Imagination Tool" that uses generative AI to bring children's voices into large-scale co-creation, and a wellbeing-and-AI research partnership with Oxford's Reuben College and its Child-Centred AI Design Lab.In this episode, Bethany talks with Svenia Busson about:Finding a laptop in a skip — the origin story behind Tech Will Save UsDesigning the BBC micro:bit with Microsoft, Samsung, and ARM — reaching four million children across 97 countriesWhy Fam Studio exists to serve "the village," not just the childTechno-optimism versus AI anxiety — holding both at onceWhether AI reinforces the industrial-era school model or finally breaks it openBuilding the "Imagination Tool" — using generative AI to bring children's voices into co-creation at scale"No Tech Sundays" and the house rules her family set for her teenager's AI useMoving from human-centered to life-centered design — what biomimicry teaches educatorsShe closes with future-guest picks: Caroline Essame, author of Why Nature Matters (Routledge); Noan Fesnoux, creative adviser to Dubai's Museum of the Future (LinkedIn); Liz Robinson, CEO of Big Education (bigeducation.org); and Jenny Gibson of Cambridge's PEDAL Centre (pedalhub.net).

We asked one of the most respected education technology researchers in the world a simple question: how should schools teach students to use AI?His answer? We don't know yet, and pretending we do is the problem.Justin Reich is an Associate Professor at MIT and Director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, author of Failure to Disrupt (Harvard University Press), host of the TeachLab podcast, and the force behind The Homework Machine — a landmark 7-part podcast series investigating what's really happening with AI in classrooms across the US.In this conversation with Svenia Busson, Justin explores:Why "AI literacy" follows the same broken playbook as digital citizenship and computational thinking — and will likely fail students the same wayWhat the history of web literacy teaches us: it took 25 years to find strategies that actually workWhy domain expertise — not AI knowledge — may be the most critical factor in using AI wellWhat to make of "AI-powered" schools like Alpha SchoolWhat students themselves are saying: two-thirds of US students say AI is harming their critical thinkingWhy "the homework machine" is the most honest name for what's happening in classrooms todayAlso mentioned in this episode:Mike Caulfield's SIFT framework for teaching web literacy: https://guides.lib.uchicago.edu/c.php?g=1241077&p=9082322A Guide to AI in Schools: Perspectives for the Perplexed — MIT Teaching Systems Lab guidebook (August 2025) https://tsl.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/GuideToAIInSchools.pdf"Stop Pretending to Know How to Teach AI" — Justin's article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (November 2025) https://www.chronicle.com/article/stop-pretending-you-know-how-to-teach-aiThe Homework Machine podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-homework-machine-what-ai-is-really-doing-in-classrooms/id583456652?i=1000747231954 (a must listen)

The tech industry is building powerful AI tools for children, often without understanding how children actually learn and grow. That's the gap Anne-Sophie Seret set out to close.Anne-Sophie is the co-founder and Executive Director of everyone.ai, a Silicon Valley nonprofit bridging artificial intelligence and developmental neuroscience. She is also the Chief Program Officer of iRAISE (International Research-driven Alliance for AI Serving Every child), the global coalition she launched at the Paris AI Action Summit alongside 11 governments, UNESCO, UNICEF, and companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.In this episode, she and Svenia explore why children's brains are not mini adult brains, and why that changes everything for AI design. They discuss the critical developmental windows AI is currently disrupting (0–6 for language acquisition; 12–14 for social skills development), what the research on teenagers and anthropomorphic AI actually shows, and where the line is between AI as a scaffold and AI as a crutch. Anne-Sophie also shares the story of how iRAISE was built in just three months, what a "proactive" approach to AI safety looks like in practice, and why regulating AI is actually easier when children are the focus.She also previews the AI Safety Builder, a new science-backed tool launching at VivaTech that helps EdTech founders evaluate how their conversational AI interacts with children, detecting anthropomorphic, interactional, and relational risk cues based on the work of 30+ researchers.Resources mentioned:everyone.ai — nonprofit at the intersection of AI and child developmentiRAISE Coalition — launched at the Paris AI Action Summit (February 2025) https://parispeaceforum.org/initiatives/beneficial-ai-for-children-coalition/Research: "Adolescents & Anthropomorphic AI: Rethinking Design for Wellbeing" https://everyone.ai/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Adolescents-Anthropomorphic-AI-Rethinking-Design-for-Wellbeing-.pdfResearch: "Mapping of generative AI impacts on child development" — mapping of risks and opportunities by age group, contributed to the G7 agenda https://everyone.ai/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Mapping-of-GenAI-impacts-on-child-development-1.pdfBook recommendation: Love to Learn by Isabelle Hau (Stanford) https://www.isabellehau.com/