Just vibes and learning to use ChatGPT

Previous Visit

This was my second visit to Moonlight Children's Home. The girls already knew me. The last time I came, I had brought a French traveller who had cycled all the way to Nepal, and a 20-year-old Chinese girl who was travelling the country alone without knowing a word of English or Nepali. So they had an impression. That visit was also part of a stationery distribution organized by the Leo Club.

SheCodes

SheCodes had been in the works for a while. I was IT head for LCKHP, a local Leo club, and this was one of the programs we had planned. The name was a bit too polished — it worked well in a Facebook post. But I didn't actually want to teach them to code.

I brought Suesha, a former colleague from Khalti. As a male, I could talk about technology, but to actually inspire them to see it as a career, they needed a female role model they could relate to.

We brought laptops and a projector. No concrete plan — only the intention to keep it natural and go with the flow.

It didn't sit right with me to teach coding to a group at so many different levels. So we started with basics. How a computer works. What you can do with one. They already knew enough. So the plan shifted again.

We opened ChatGPT. Showed them how it works. Then we asked them to use it to create a presentation about their dreams and ambitions.

Fifteen minutes later, they were presenting.

Bank manager. Teacher. Counselor. Economist. International social worker. Traveller who also educates. Each one stood up and presented what they had built.

What stood out was that most of them wanted to be somewhere they could help others. Most people are taught to pursue a dream job. These girls were describing something closer to a dream life. Their upbringing shaped how they thought about it.

I believe most people have a natural desire to help others. Society tends to diminish and simplify that into something more individualistic. These girls hadn't been through that filter yet.

Ranjan, Suesha, and I kept glancing at each other. The way you do when something is happening and you don't want to interrupt it by saying so.

Takeaway

It was a chocolate-filled day of talking about tech, life, and dreams. We'd gone there to teach them something. They ended up teaching us more.

In fifteen minutes, with a tool none of them had used before, they were ready to present their futures to a room full of people. AI can be pivotal to how students learn — and what these girls showed is that given the right tool and the right question, students don't need much else.