Stop Downloading Apps for Your Kids. Build Them Instead.
My three-year-old has shipped nine games. His portfolio lives at madladstudios.com. I'm not teaching him to code (he can barely spell). We're using Claude. He tells me what the game should do, I type prompts, we ship it.
This isn't some "teach kids to code" thing. This is about parents sitting next to their toddlers, building stuff together using AI as a creative tool instead of handing them an iPad full of downloads.
The Cold Start Problem
Every parent I talk to wants to do this. The barrier isn't learning AI, it's staring at a blank prompt box thinking: "What do I even ask for? My kid's three. He just wants trucks."
Existing resources assume you're teaching an 8-year-old, require a $200 robot kit, or give vague advice about "computational thinking." Nobody's solving the actual problem: giving you a good prompt that works for your specific toddler right now.
The Solution: Pixel Foundery
Pixel Foundery generates ready-to-paste prompts for building with your kid using AI.
Three inputs:
- Age (2-5 years old)
- Interest (trucks, dinosaurs, space, animals, etc.)
- Project type (game, story, art tool, science experiment, math puzzle, music maker)
One output: a prompt optimised for toddlers that you copy-paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini.
What You Get
Every prompt asks for:
- Single HTML files (no npm, no App Store, no setup)
- Touch-friendly controls (tiny fingers matter)
- Bright colours and sound effects (you're competing with Bluey)
- Zero reading required (they're toddlers)
- One core mechanic (simplicity wins)
Because that's what actually works when you're building with a two-year-old. I know. I've shipped this nine times.
How It Works
Pick your kid's age. Pick what they're obsessed with. Pick what to build. Hit generate. Copy the prompt. Paste into your AI tool. Build something together tonight.
The static version is a single index.html file with 25+ handcrafted prompt templates across six categories (games, stories, art tools, science experiments, math puzzles, music makers). Fork it, open it, done.
The live site runs on Anything with Claude Sonnet generating unique prompts in real-time. Same interface, infinite variety.
Why This Matters
Parents don't need "less screen time" advice. They need better screen time. This is for parents who want to sit next to their kids and make something together.
Every resource for teaching kids to code either targets older kids, assumes coding knowledge, or costs money. Pixel Foundery is just the missing first step: a good prompt, personalised to your kid, that produces something they'll actually want to play with.
The Tech
Static version: Single HTML file. No frameworks, no build step, no dependencies. The prompts themselves produce single-file HTML projects. Turtles all the way down.
Live version: Built on Anything with Claude Sonnet. Same UI, AI-generated prompts instead of templates.
Light/dark mode via prefers-color-scheme. Fully responsive. Mobile-first.
The hard part wasn't the UI. That took hours. The hard part was writing prompts that reliably produce good results from Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini across six project categories and eight interest areas. Getting specificity right so a three-year-old can actually play with the output required serious iteration.
Try It
Your kid can build apps before they can read. This is the tool that makes it easy.
Also writing Raising Pixels, a newsletter about computational thinking for tiny humans, building with AI as a family, and raising kids who create more than they consume.