We just give them the tools to see it, and build something real for the people they belong to.
An open-source teaching method being developed by Reemy (Kareem Adedeji Richard Akabashorun) and Coach Lamont Kirton in Brooklyn, alongside BeyondChess and an inclusive adaptive basketball program. The method is the body. The use cases below are reflections of it into specific contexts. MIT-licensed. Forks welcome. Working name is The Method until Lamont and Reemy lock in the real one — see the open items section.
We teach young people to notice which beliefs and habits got installed in them without their choosing, and the skill to deliberately build new ones. Success is measured by what each kid builds from their own real problem.
Chess is the surface. Attention is the actual subject. A kid who finishes can sustain attention, see structure others miss, and turn a problem they care about into something real.
That skill transfers — to school, to work, to whatever they do next. We aren't teaching coding. We aren't teaching chess. We are teaching kids to see their own world as a system they can change, and giving them the tools to ship a first version of that change.
Start with the kid's own observation — a problem they actually see in their own life, family, or block. Not a topic assigned. Not a tutorial. Their thing.
The kid interviews family, classmates, teachers, anyone living with the same concern. Listening is the first discipline. The build hasn't started; the kid is becoming a researcher of their own world.
Together we map the concern to the people it will affect, to what they already have, to what's missing. This is where cross-domain pattern recognition kicks in — what concept from class is actually structuring this real problem?
The kid leads on intent; the teacher guides on what's buildable. The kid stays in the driver's seat of their own concern. The build is real, small, shippable.
The teacher drives the AI build process; the kid shadows. They watch, ask, redirect when the build drifts from their intent. They are not consuming AI content; they are stewarding the build of their own idea.
We deploy the build — a website, a system, a community tool — in a form their family, classmates, and community can actually use. Their name is on it. Their reasoning is on it. They wrote it.
The six steps above are the surface. Underneath, every session is teaching one of three moves. They are taught in order because each depends on the one before it.
Catch a belief or habit and recognize it as something that was built, not something that's simply true. A kid who thinks “I'm just bad at this”feels like they're reporting a fact. Move 1 is learning to see it as a thread that got walked into them — which means it can be re-walked.
The old habit reps itself without permission. Move 2 is deliberately practicing the better pattern while the old one is still pulling. The hard middle. The guitar principle: you don't stop the rhythm to fix a mistake — you keep the strum going until the mistake becomes texture.
A new skill stays fragile until something real depends on it. Move 3 is making the kid build an actual thing from their own problem, so the skill becomes load-bearing. Care alone doesn't hold a skill in place. Care plus a structure resting on it does.
See it. Walk it under load. Build on it.Every session in a cohort is one of these three moves. The six-step method above is just the three moves spelled out as a workflow. The cohort isn't learning a curriculum — they're practicing a skill, in three stages, until each stage holds.
Coach Lamont named the philosophy that powers this work, and named it well. BeyondChess is analog coding: the kid was already doing CS on the chess board — we just helped them see it. This method runs the same move with the kid's life: their concerns and observations are already the early stages of product thinking. We help them see it and ship it.
The kid was already doing the thinking. The method just makes the thread visible, and gives them the tools to walk it.
That framing has a practical consequence: this isn't a new curriculum to bolt on, and it isn't two unrelated programs. BeyondChess and this work are one philosophy in two mediums. The funder story is the same. The theory of change is the same. The kid walking through one is being prepared for the other.
Most schools incentivize the wrong thing. Schools specify an outcome — a test score, a finished assignment, a grade — and the kid becomes an optimizer. The optimizer correctly delivers the specified outcome by the cheapest available path. In the 2000s, SparkNotes. In the 2010s, paying for essays. Today, ChatGPT. The kid isn't broken. The kid is aligned — to the reward we set, not the one we meant.
This method fixes that by rewarding the trajectoryinstead of the endpoint. There is no SparkNotes for noticing a real problem in your own neighborhood. There is no shortcut to interviewing six families about water access. The shipped thing isn't the rewarded target — it's the natural consequence of having actually walked the process. What the method rewards is the walk. The AI shortcut has nowhere to land.
The teacher is the anchor — they hold a steady rhythm the whole room runs on. Kids orbitat different distances based on where they currently are. A new kid orbits close, matching the basic pattern. An advanced kid orbits further out, adding variation, while staying in the teacher's rhythm.
Floor-raising is the core move. The anchor always plays at a level the lowest kid can join. The advanced kids add their substance on top. Everyone stays in the same wave. Over the weeks, as the beginners develop, the whole wave rises together. Nobody is left out, nobody is held back.
The most damaged kids are the priority.Not because they're easiest — they aren't. Because the change in them is the most visible and the most transferable. When the kid everyone gave up on starts holding attention, the whole room sees that the method is real.
Roughly 4 kids to 1 instructor at the youngest ages. Non-negotiable. Anything higher and some kids stop building and start watching. The method depends on each kid being seen.
Every kid produces one project page, posted publicly with their consent and their name on it:
At the end of each cohort, a Demo Day: kids present their individual builds and the cohort presents one shared group project. Family and community attend.
These pages, together, are the results. They are what a funder reads. Proof that arrives before the funding, not after a promise of it.
As cohorts run, the kid-built project pages will land here on this site, under /method/work. Their builds, their names, their reasoning. Live and visible.
The method is the body. Each context below is a specific reflection of that body into a specific room and a specific group of people.
Built with Coach Lamont Kirton in Brooklyn. Chess is the surface, attention is the subject. A 50-week arc maps onto the three moves naturally — Read the Parts, Read the Connections, Read the Flow, Read the Whole, Read Anything. The youth-builder program is the same philosophy in the second medium: kids build apps from their own concerns. Entry age 7+, ratio 4:1.
The same method applied to adults building real projects. Partner: Jonti. Started from a real meeting at a diner; same engine, different person in the chair. Proof that the method isn't age-locked.
A concept piece written for Tanzania Education Corporation around a STEM/CS Teacher Fellowship at Tumaini in Makuyuni, Monduli District. NECTA-locked in-curriculum integration, Shadow → Interrogate → Drive AI staging mapped to Form level, worked example with a Form 5 student. Theoretical; would activate if the fellowship lands.
The method is MIT-licensed and meant to be forked. If you're running a youth program, an NGO, a fellowship, or a tutoring practice and want to apply it in your context, take it. Contact is below.
This isn't a novel method. The project-based pipeline shape — kid's problem to research to shipped artifact — has been validated by programs operating at global scale.
Where this method adds something is narrower: the deliberate AI-staging arc (Shadow → Interrogate → Drive, mapped to age/Form level), the observation pedagogy (pressure vs attention; self-observation as endpoint), and the in-curriculum integrationthat fits inside a school day rather than competing with it. Everything else, we're standing on the giants above.
This method is at v0.1. The shape is solid; the implementation details are deliberately open until the first cohort runs. Naming these in public so they're visible, not hidden.
If you're a teacher, NGO, fellow, school director, or parent and any of this fits your context, run it. Fork it. The method gets sharper through real applications.
The kid was already doing the thinking. The method just makes it visible. The rest is just walking with them.
v0.1 · open-source, MIT · this page will keep updating as Coach Lamont and Reemy run the first cohort and learn what actually works in the room.