“What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s the quintessential icebreaker we throw at children, usually expecting an answer that fits somewhere on a Halloween costume rack: an astronaut, a firefighter, a vet. Elizabeth Tweedale remembers the moment her daughter, Ocean, made her declaration. With the unshakeable confidence of a five-year-old, she wanted to be a veterinarian.
The reality check arrived shortly after. “She realized you actually have to deal with really sick pets,” Elizabeth says. “The dream dissolved because the reality was sad, not just cuddly.”
This isn’t just a cute parenting anecdote; it’s a microcosm of a systemic failure in how we prepare the next generation. We allow children to build their entire future identities on “images” rather than “understandings.” We wait until the high-stakes environment of junior year in high school to ask students to choose a career trajectory, often forcing them to pick from either a menu of limited careers or ones they have never actually seen in action.
The Problem of “Identity Foreclosure”
The data suggests we are waiting too long to start the vocation conversation. According to the OECD (the global economic think tank), the career aspirations of seven-year-olds are already heavily influenced by gender stereotypes and social background, perceptions that barely budge by age 17.
Sociologists call this “identity foreclosure,” when young people commit to a career path before they’ve even had the chance to explore their alternatives.
Elizabeth, a founder and AI creator who was patenting systems long before “Generative AI” became a boardroom buzzword, believes technology is the key to breaking this cycle. Through her company, Coco Coders, she isn’t just teaching kids to move blocks of code. She’s teaching them to see the invisible technical infrastructure that powers every industry on earth.
The Insight Gap: A study by Education and Employers titled “Drawing the Future” found that only 1% of children learn about their dream job from a person visiting their school. The rest are guessing based on TV, social media, or following in their family’s footsteps.
Moving Beyond the “STEM vs. Liberal Arts” Binary
Before building the Coco Coders curriculum, Elizabeth’s team interviewed hundreds of high school principals across the U.S. Two problems surfaced repeatedly:
- Students arrive in high school without basic technical fluency.
- Students have no “mental map” of the professional world.
“They don’t even start looking at life after graduation until they are 16 or 17,” Elizabeth notes. “By then, they are faced with an overwhelming paradox of choice and almost zero context.“
Historically, the American education system has funneled students into a rigid dichotomy: College or No College; STEM or Liberal Arts. But the modern economy is a “blur.” A student who loves animals might be the perfect person to build the software that runs a regional shelter system. A student fascinated by cities might end up designing the traffic algorithms that keep millions of people moving.
By integrating AI and coding into lesson plans early, we aren’t just teaching “tech.” We are providing a lens through which every career becomes more tangible.
Case Study: Making the Abstract Tangible
How do you make a nine-year-old understand “infrastructure”? You don’t give them a textbook. You give them a problem to solve.
The Coco Coders model uses 10-week foundations followed by four-week “deep dives.” In a module on ocean conservation, students don’t just talk about plastic pollution, they also study real-life applications like Mr. Trash Wheel, the robotic, solar-powered device cleaning Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.
“It’s saying, here was a problem, here was the solution. Now, what’s your idea?” Elizabeth explains. By building a game or a simulation based on that real-world tech, the student stops being a passive observer of “the environment” and starts seeing themselves as a technical problem-solver within it.
This is the creative pivot from “I like animals” to “I can design the automated feeding systems that keep them healthy.“
Widening the Funnel for the “Non-Coders”
There is a deeper, more personal mission here for Elizabeth. As a woman who studied computer science at the university level, she was frequently the only woman in the room. Often, the culture was dominated by peers who had been gaming and tinkering since they were toddlers. That “head start” created a cultural barrier that made the field feel exclusive.
“Coco Coders is explicitly designed against that pattern,” Elizabeth says. The program is built for the kids who don’t think of themselves as coders.
The Logician might focus on the game mechanics and back-end efficiency.
The Storyteller might spend their time building a complex narrative world or a visual interface.
Both are building the same foundational technical literacy, but they are entering through different doors. In the real world, tech companies need both the person who writes the algorithm and the person who understands the human experience it’s meant to serve.
The 65% Challenge
The goal isn’t to hand every nine-year-old a 20-year career plan. It is to ensure that when the “moment of choosing” a career finally arrives in high school, they aren’t picking from a list of three familiar archetypes.
According to the World Economic Forum, 65% of children entering primary school today will end up working in job types that don’t even exist yet. If the jobs don’t exist, we can’t teach kids what to be. We can only teach them how to be, learn, and think.
“We’re solving longer-term problems,” Elizabeth says. “The ones that don’t just exist for today, but for the world these kids are actually going to inherit.“
Disclaimer: GeekWire newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content..
