She Contributed to the Development of AI. Now She’s Teaching Children to Understand and Create With It

Founder and mother Elizabeth Tweedale believes children should not grow up as passive consumers of technology. Through coding, computational thinking and AI literacy, she aims to help them better understand how technology works, identify its potential limitations and develop the confidence to explore ideas of their own.

Long before artificial intelligence became a source of excitement and anxiety around family dinner tables, Elizabeth Tweedale was working with the technology behind it. Her path began in Iowa, where she studied computer science at Loras College. She later trained and worked as an architect, built a career in London and eventually moved into workplace technology and artificial intelligence. As co-founder and CTO of GoSpace AI, Elizabeth helped develop patented AI technology years before generative AI models like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Claude or Microsoft’s Copilot entered the mainstream market.

Today, she is focused on a different challenge: preparing children to understand a world increasingly shaped by algorithms. Elizabeth is the founder and CEO of Coco Coders, which provides live, small-group online coding classes for children ages six to fourteen. Coco Coders has taught more than 10,000 children how to code and currently has students attending from 15 countries, with most based in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Her goal is not to turn every child into a future software engineer. “The goal is to give children enough understanding that technology does not simply happen to them,” Elizabeth says. “They should be able to question it, create with it and recognize when it may be getting something wrong.”

Finding a place in computer science

Elizabeth’s own experience with computer science began well before her career in architecture or AI. After her Intro to Computer Science class at her alma mater, she continued pursuing the field at a time when women were still relatively uncommon in computer science programs. She went on to lead the university’s Computer Science Club and found that being a gamer helped her feel at home amongst her classmates.

“I joined many weekend Madden Marathons and became part of the group quite naturally,” she says. “I enjoyed that culture, so I never felt as though I had to stand outside it. But it also made me realize that another young woman, with exactly the same technical potential but different interests, might not have found belonging quite so easily.”

Years later, even after becoming the CTO and one of the technologists behind an AI company, assumptions and judgements about who belonged in the room persisted. When Elizabeth arrived at early investor meetings with GoSpace AI’s male CEO, receptionists and investors regularly assumed she was his assistant, laughing with an embarrassed tone when they found out she wasn’t.

Though those experiences did not stop her from building a career in technology, they did make her more aware of how early ideas about identity and belonging begin.

“If girls only encounter computer science after they have already decided who technology is for, we have waited too long,” she says. “They need opportunities to build, experiment, and see themselves as creators from an early age.”

That belief now shapes much of her work at Coco Coders.

From computer science to architecture and AI

Although computer science, architecture and artificial intelligence may initially seem like separate disciplines, Elizabeth sees a clear connection between them.

Architecture taught her to think about systems. A building is not simply a physical object. It influences how people move, interact, communicate, live and make decisions in their everyday lives. Technology expanded that same way of thinking into the digital world. AI systems are also designed environments. These systems are created by people, trained on human-generated information and used in contexts where they may shape human choices.

Understanding them therefore requires more than knowing how to operate a tool. It means considering how the system was built, what information shaped it and where its limitations lie. That systems-based thinking now underpins Coco Coders.

“AI literacy is not about teaching a child to ask a chatbot to complete their homework,” Elizabeth says. “It is about teaching them to ask where an answer came from, what might be missing and whether they are using the tool to support their thinking or replace it.”

Showing up for the hard conversations

Elizabeth regularly speaks with students, educators, parents and community organizations about both the possibilities and risks surrounding AI. Some people remain cautious about introducing children to artificial intelligence, particularly because of concerns about its potential risks. Elizabeth sees those concerns as worth acknowledging rather than dismissing.

“I do not think parents are wrong to be worried,” she says. “These are powerful technologies. They raise genuine questions about privacy, misinformation, bias, academic integrity and children becoming dependent on tools they do not understand.”

Where she differs is in the proposed solution. Avoiding AI education is unlikely to stop young people from encountering or using AI, but it may leave them less prepared to understand its potential risks.

Elizabeth has explored these questions with high school students as well. Rather than beginning with instructions about what students should or should not do, she has focused on questions about how AI makes decisions, why it can present incorrect information with confidence and where the line may be between useful assistance and replacing independent thinking.

The students arrived with different levels of experience and skepticism. By the end of the workshop, they had developed their own AI honor codes, setting out principles for deciding how and when they believed AI should be used.

From Iowa to London and back to a smaller community

After growing up in Iowa and building much of her career in London, Elizabeth eventually returned to the United States with her family, settling in Incline Village, Nevada. The move was a personal choice. She and her husband wanted their three children to grow up with greater access to nature, community and ultimately be surrounded by the ‘American can-do attitude’.

Her commitment to making technology education accessible, however, remains connected to her own childhood in Iowa. Growing up outside a major technology center gave her an enduring awareness that talent is distributed far more evenly than opportunity. Children in rural communities and smaller school districts are no less capable than their urban peers, but they may have fewer pathways into emerging fields.

That experience now informs Coco Coders’ live online model. A child does not need to live near a specialist technology school or have a parent who works in the industry to participate in an interactive coding class.

“Where a child grows up should not determine whether they understand the technology shaping their future,” Elizabeth says.

Preparing children to participate, not just consume

Elizabeth’s message to parents is not that every child should spend more time on a screen. It is that children need to move from being passive consumers of technology toward becoming informed participants.

That may involve learning to code, building a simple game, testing an AI-generated answer, discussing algorithmic bias or deciding when the best choice is not to use technology at all. The objective is agency.

Children who understand how technology is built may be better prepared to ask who designed it, what goals it was created to serve and whose interests it reflects. That understanding can also help them view technology as something they may be able to shape and create, rather than simply use.

“We teach children to read and write so they can participate fully in society,” Elizabeth says. “Understanding technology is becoming part of that same basic preparation.”

Not every child will become a programmer, architect or AI founder. Every child, however, is likely to grow up in a world where automated systems may shape what they see, the opportunities presented to them and some of the decisions that affect their lives.

Elizabeth believes they should enter that world equipped not only to use its tools, but to create, understand and question them.
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Elizabeth Tweedale is the founder and CEO of Coco Coders, which provides live online coding education for children ages six to fourteen. Coco Coders has taught more than 10,000 students and currently has learners attending weekly classes from 15 countries. Learn more at cococoders.com.