Nanjing schools showcase hands‑on AI education with robot dogs

This story is about schoolkids and robot dogs on the surface, but underneath it shows how quickly AI literacy is being normalized in parts of China. Nanjing isn’t just teaching students to use tools like image generators—it’s running citywide showcases where children design AI‑powered embroidery, digital‑twin farms, and environmental monitoring projects, framed explicitly around ethics and “AI with warmth.” ([xhby.net](https://www.xhby.net/content/s698710a2e4b0806c7f04ad58.html))

For the AGI race, talent pipelines are as important as model weights. Cities that expose students early to both the capabilities and the social questions around AI will produce a generation of developers, policymakers and citizens who take these systems for granted. That can accelerate domestic adoption of advanced models and lower the friction for deploying agentic systems across industry and government.

There is also a subtle competitive signal: when local education bureaus roll out AI showcases as part of official action plans, it indicates that central guidance around “AI for youth” is turning into concrete programs. That’s a contrast with many Western systems still arguing over whether large models belong in the classroom at all. Over a decade, that gap in hands‑on familiarity could translate into meaningful differences in who is comfortable building, governing, and critiquing increasingly capable systems.