High school student Khushi Kharuna creates and leads coding and artificial intelligence (AI) summer camps for K-12 students in her community outside Philadelphia. Priya Kumar, PNC Technologies Career Development Professor in Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), studies how young people navigate the digital world. Their shared interests led to a research collaboration exploring a youth-led STEM learning model that puts children's voices at the center of the learning experience.
According to Kumar, youth-led learning lets youth take the lead in designing learning experiences and delivering them to peers. Kids discover something they're excited about - like computing - create a curriculum and teach the material to other youth their age. Kumar and Kharuna recently found that participants responded positively to this approach, reporting high levels of engagement and satisfaction when learning from their peers. The team presented their findings at the 2026 Association for Computing Machinery Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference in the United Kingdom in June. The study was published in the conference's proceedings.
"Khushi has been leading camps for kids since 2023," Kumar said. "The participants consistently seemed to be getting something meaningful out of the experience, and we had a hunch that the positive impact of the camps might be tied to the fact that the person teaching the camps was close in age to the participants."
Kumar and Kharuna recently found that youth responded positively to this approach, reporting high levels of engagement and satisfaction when learning from their peers.
Kumar and Kharuna designed a research project to explore how youth-designed learning experiences can help children develop interests and skills in computing.
In summer 2025, the researchers studied two coding and AI camps Kharuna hosted at community libraries for children ages 11 to 15. Thirty-five campers participated in the study, which included surveys, participant comments and researcher observations to capture their experiences with the camps. One camp focused on coding in the programming language Python, while the other introduced participants to the basics of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The researchers examined not only participants' experiences with the camps but also whether their interest in computing changed.
Survey results showed that participants had significantly greater interest in programming and AI after completing the camps. They described the activities as engaging and fun, particularly compared with school-based coding classes. They said hands-on activities, such as creating games, helped them apply what they learned, and the support of peer instructor Kharuna made complex concepts more relatable. Several participants described her as a role model and said her leadership inspired them to pursue leadership opportunities themselves.
The findings suggested that youth-led learning may be a promising way to encourage more children to explore computing, according to Kumar.
"We're seeing that children can learn programming from other young people," Kumar said. "Young instructors can create a different kind of learning environment from a traditional classroom. The students perceive them less as an authority figure and more as someone who has recently been in my shoes. It's more than kids teaching kids; it's the idea that seeing someone close in age succeed in computing may help younger students imagine themselves doing it, too."
