What ten kids built in one Saturday

We ran our first open Saturday at the studio in Bahria Town last weekend. About ten kids, one afternoon, and a table covered in boards, sensors and wires. Three hours later, things on that table were beeping, moving, and playing games the kids had made themselves. Here's exactly what happened.

A taster session has one job: to answer the question every parent is actually asking — is this for my kid? You can't answer that with a slideshow. So we don't do talks. We put real hardware and real AI tools in front of the kids and let them make something they can point at when they leave.

The builds that beeped and moved

The engineering table was the loud one. Kids wired sensors onto breadboards, connected them to Arduino and NodeMCU boards, and — the important part — watched the readings come alive on a web page they could actually read:

• A gas detector: an MQ-2 sensor learns what clean air smells like, then flips a browser dashboard to 'GAS DETECTED' the moment something's off — with a live graph of the last few minutes.
• A distance sensor: an ultrasonic module measuring how close your hand is, printing the number to a tiny screen in real time.
• A servo robot: a little 3D-printed robot the kids assembled and then drove from a web page — wave, nod, dance — no app to install, no code to run. Type it, and it moves.

That last moment — the robot waving back, the dashboard flipping red — is when a kid stops being polite and actually leans in. It's the whole reason we teach with hardware and not just screens.

The AI part: they built the games, not just played them

At the other end of the room, kids sat with Google's Gemini and built browser games by describing what they wanted — a 3D space game, an arcade shooter, a firefighter game putting out fires across a city. Then they played what they'd made, spotted what was broken, and asked the AI to fix it. That loop — imagine it, build it with AI, judge it, fix it — is the actual skill we're teaching. Not memorising syntax. Directing the machine, and catching it when it's wrong.

What we'd change

Honestly? We planned too much for three hours. We had five things we wanted to run and a Saturday only holds so many — the stations that didn't fit are exactly why the ongoing sessions exist. The room also skewed younger than our usual 8–17 pitch, which turned out to be a good problem: the builds held the younger kids' attention completely, and it's shaping a gentler on-ramp for our youngest makers.

If your child would like a turn at the table, everyone starts the same way — with a single taster session where they build something real, and you both see if it fits. We keep the studio small on purpose, so there's a spot for real hands-on time.