Why Summer Camps Still Matter in the Age of AI

Every few months someone asks me, half-seriously, whether summer academies still make sense now that a teenager can ask an AI to explain almost anything. It is a fair question, and the honest answer is the opposite of what they expect: the more capable AI becomes, the more these weeks matter, not less.

The thing that is no longer scarce

For most of history, information was the bottleneck. You went somewhere — a library, a university, a mentor's office — because that was where the knowledge lived. That world is gone. A student today has a competent tutor in their pocket, available at 3am, infinitely patient, fluent in every subject.

So if information is now effectively free, what is actually scarce? Three things: judgement, taste, and the muscle memory of doing difficult work alongside people who care about it. None of those can be downloaded. All of them are built in rooms, with other people, over time.

What a good academy provides that a screen cannot

Three weeks — or even one — in a place that takes the work seriously does something an app fundamentally cannot.

• **A real cohort.** Being surrounded by students who are just slightly more ambitious than you, in the best possible way, recalibrates what you think is normal. Ambition is contagious, and it spreads in person.
• **A mentor who has done it.** Not an algorithm predicting the next token, but a human who can look at your half-finished work, see what you were *trying* to do, and ask the question that unlocks it.
• **The friction of finishing.** AI removes friction; learning sometimes requires it. The struggle to get a robot working, to defend a pitch, to take a hard critique and try again — that friction is where confidence is forged.

How we use AI, rather than fear it

We are not romantics about this. Several of our programmes — Artificial Intelligence most obviously, but others too — teach students to use these tools well, critically and ethically. The goal is not to pretend the technology does not exist. It is to raise young people who command it rather than being quietly commanded by it.

That is a human skill. Knowing when to trust a model and when to doubt it, how to spot bias in its output, how to ask it a better question — these are exactly the judgements that come from doing real work with real mentors.

The test of a worthwhile week

Here is the simple measure I offer parents. If your child comes home having *made* something — a paper, a product, a pitch, a piece — and having made five friends who will still be texting them in a decade, the week has earned its place. AI can help with the first half of that sentence. It cannot touch the second.

The future will belong to young people who can do the things machines cannot: judge, create, collaborate and finish. A good summer is where they start to practise.