Take Your Kids to Work Day: Vibe Coding With goose

This year’s Take Your Kids to Work Day at Block was unlike any other. Instead of just showing kids what we do, we let them experience it firsthand—by building their own video games using goose, our open source AI agent framework.

Turning Kids Into Developers

The premise was simple but ambitious: could elementary and middle school students, with no prior coding experience, create working games in just a few hours using AI assistance?

The answer was a resounding yes.

Armed with goose and their imaginations, kids created everything from platformers to puzzle games. They learned to describe what they wanted, iterate on designs, and debug issues—all fundamental skills in software development.

How It Worked

We set up a safe, supervised environment where kids could:

1. Describe their game ideas to goose in natural language
2. See their ideas come to life as goose generated working code
3. Iterate and improve by asking goose to modify features
4. Play and share their creations with friends and family

The games ranged from simple to surprisingly sophisticated. One student created a maze game with multiple levels. Another built a space shooter with power-ups and scoring. A third designed a puzzle game that taught math concepts.

What We Learned

Kids Are Natural Prompt Engineers

Without any training in “prompt engineering,” kids intuitively understood how to communicate with goose. They asked questions, gave feedback, and refined their requests—exactly how experienced developers use AI tools.

Creativity Matters More Than Syntax

By removing the barrier of learning syntax, kids could focus on what they wanted to create. The constraint wasn’t their ability to code, but their imagination and problem-solving skills.

AI Makes Programming Accessible

We saw kids who had never written a line of code create working programs. This democratization of software development opens up new possibilities for education and creativity.

The Importance of Safe AI Tools

For this event, we took extra precautions to ensure a kid-safe environment:

• Supervised sessions with Block employees present
• Content filtering and moderation
• Age-appropriate project guidelines
• Parent/guardian consent and involvement

These safeguards are essential when introducing young people to AI tools. As we build goose and other AI technologies, we’re committed to making them safe and appropriate for all ages.

Beyond Take Your Kids to Work Day

The success of this event has us thinking about broader applications:

• Educational programs that teach computational thinking through AI-assisted creation
• After-school coding clubs where kids can build projects with AI support
• Family coding sessions that bring generations together through technology

Try It Yourself

goose is open source and available for anyone to use. While we designed this event specifically for kids, the principles apply to anyone learning to code or wanting to build software more efficiently.

Visit github.com/block/goose to get started, and check out our documentation for tutorials and examples.

The Future of Learning to Code

Watching kids create games with goose gave us a glimpse of the future of programming education. AI won’t replace the need to understand logic, problem-solving, and computational thinking—but it can make these skills more accessible and engaging.

As one student put it after building their first game: “I want to make more things now!”

That’s exactly the reaction we were hoping for.