Asia's AI contests for kids ask to see the first prompt

Your child shows you a dragon. It is a good dragon: scales catching the light, a city burning tastefully in the background. It took about eleven seconds and one sentence typed into a free image tool. You want to be pleased. Some part of you is not quite sure what you are being pleased about.

That flinch is fair. It is also, it turns out, a solved problem. The people running children’s AI contests across this region have answered it, and not by banning anything. They just ask to see the working.

Japan’s award wants your first three prompts

The fourth AI-Utilization Education Award (AI活用教育賞2026), run by the Japanese teaching NPO TOSS and judged by a panel led by a professor at Tamagawa University’s Graduate School of Teacher Education, has a division called 次世代クリエーター部門, the Next Generation Creator Division. It is open to anyone aged 18 or under.

Entrants pick a format (a short PDF, a shared cloud document, a video under a minute, a web app) and send in what they made. Then comes the interesting part. They must also submit their prompts: up to the first three they typed, and up to the last three before they called it finished.

Read that again. The contest is not asking for the prompt that worked. It wants the one that did not, alongside the one that eventually did, so a judge can see the distance travelled between them.

The judging criteria say the same thing out loud. Four things get scored: originality, how clearly the child can account for what the AI actually did, whether the result is of some use to other people, and 安心して使える工夫とルール, roughly “the care and the rules that make it safe to use”. Entries closed on 17 May and the ceremony is on 2 August. Top prize is a ¥30,000 voucher, which tells you nobody is doing this for the money.

One more detail worth stealing. Because AI tools set their own age floors, the rules allow a child who cannot legally operate the tool to submit work that an adult made by running the AI on the child’s instructions. Parental consent is required either way. The idea stays the child’s; the typing can be shared. For a seven-year-old with a dragon in their head, that is exactly the right compromise.

Korea turned it into a festival

South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT opened its 전국민 AI 경진대회, the National AI Competition, on 26 March. It runs from April through November and aims at more than two million participants across every age group. Its own site describes it as “an AI festival where everyone enjoys tomorrow’s possibilities”, which is not a phrase a ministry reaches for by accident.

The schools track is not a coding sprint. Reporting on the launch, the Seoul Economic Daily described it as an “AI creative contest involving AI-generated artwork and fairy tales”, sitting alongside a robotics challenge tied to hands-on robot classes. Elsewhere on the programme there is a “My AI Poster” event and a family AI challenge shown as an online exhibition.

Fairy tales. A national AI push, and what it asks of the youngest entrants is a story with pictures.

Not only an East Asian habit, either. WAICY, the World Artificial Intelligence Competition for Youth, takes entries from 6 to 18 year olds in four tracks, two of which are plainly AI-generated art and AI-generated video, and says more than 73,900 students across 103 countries have taken part. We wrote in July about what American kids built over their summer, same maker’s stance, rather more drones.

Singapore put the word in the title

Closer to home, IMDA and MOE have run Code for Fun since 2014. The Ministry of Digital Development and Information says “more than 50,000 students are reached every year”. From 2025 the programme added modules called AI for Fun: five to ten hour electives open to all primary and secondary schools, described in that announcement as “hands-on exploration and ‘tinkering’ with technology”, including designing prototypes with AI and training a smart robot to respond to signals.

Two honest caveats. They are electives, so plenty of children will pass through school without meeting one. And the same announcement pairs the tinkering with “understanding AI, its uses, risks, and limitations, and ethical considerations”, which is the less fun half and probably the reason the fun half is allowed at all.

Most children are not making anything

Keep all of this in proportion. A survey by the Japanese internet provider Nifty, run in March and April 2025 with 1,430 responses from children who visit its Nifty Kids site, found 50.7% of primary and 62.5% of lower secondary respondents had used ChatGPT, and 36.6% and 44.6% respectively had used AI for studying or homework. That sample selects itself, so read it as a rough shape rather than a national figure. The number that stuck with us was a different one: 87.5% said there were no definite rules about AI at school or at home.

So the ordinary shape of a child’s AI use is question in, answer out, nobody watching. The contests are the exception, not the pattern. Which is exactly why their design is worth borrowing at home, where nobody is handing out vouchers.

Borrow the rule, skip the contest

You do not have to enter your child in anything. The Japanese rule fits on a fridge magnet: ask to see the first prompt.

When the dragon appears, ask what they typed first, and what they changed. If they can tell you, they did the work. They looked at a wrong dragon and worked out why it was wrong, which is a judgement exercise that has very little to do with AI and quite a lot to do with becoming a person who makes things. If they cannot tell you, that is not a scandal, it is an invitation. Sit down and do one together, badly, on purpose, so they feel the gap between attempt one and attempt six.

Then keep the rejects. Children delete the failures and keep the trophy, which is the precise opposite of how anyone gets good at anything. A folder of bad dragons is a better souvenir of the holidays than the good one.

Disclosure: Mentus AI builds an AI mentor for children, so we have a commercial interest in children using AI thoughtfully rather than not at all.