Vincent Verdugo

At Notre Dame Academy he leads AP Computer Science Principles and DICE, the school's disruptive innovation and entrepreneurship course, teaches Middle School Innovation, and coaches the VEX Robotics teams. His biggest focus today is agentic coding: students direct AI agents such as Claude Code to turn their own ideas into inventions that solve real problems, and they build the judgment to question, verify, and improve what those tools produce. Because these tools have lowered the barrier to entry, a student can now take an idea all the way to a working product and a pitch.

His path to teaching began with tutoring kids in Roblox and Minecraft, which he still does. A heartfelt moment with one of those students showed him that teaching was what he loved, and those game worlds still inspire many of his lessons. At NDA's pilot Coding Studio summer program, which he designed from the ground up to make learning exciting, campers built their own Roblox games with Claude Code, directed AI agents like Andy inside Minecraft, built and competed with VEX IQ robots, played their games in virtual reality headsets, and took a field trip to try full-body VR. Kids and parents loved it: at the final showcase, every parent put on a headset and played their child's game.

One on one, he translates technical ideas into plain language, starts from what each student already knows, and builds the growth mindset a fast-changing world demands. He has attended the MIT AI and Education Summit and the CSTA (Computer Science Teachers Association) Annual Conference several times, and follows what researchers and teachers are learning about how kids learn in the age of AI.

I teach AI to K-12 students every day. Parents get my honest take on AI and kids, as a teacher, not a doctor.

Technology is changing the world at an unprecedented pace, and algorithms already shape what you see and how you think. Andrew Ng calls AI the new electricity: it powers every field without being the point of any of them.

You are always the pilot, and AI is your copilot. The thinking, the taste, and the decisions stay yours, and the pilot never falls asleep in the cockpit. There are some fundamentally human skills that AI cannot do for you:

• Decide what needs to be made
• Bring human judgment and taste
• Empathize with people
• Hold a strong moral and ethical compass. For example, the designer of infinite scroll later regretted how apps used it to keep people addicted.

You may use AI a lot with me, not because it is always right, but because your future will expect you to understand it critically, and using it often is how you learn its strengths, its limits, and its failures firsthand. Use it to support your thinking, never to replace it. You must be able to think for yourself and explain everything you build.

Powerful tools call for that compass. We look at who a technology helps and who it can harm, and we use AI honestly.

The pace of change will not slow down, so students must become lifelong learners with a growth mindset. It is my social responsibility to equip you with these skills, and your social responsibility to use them to better society.