A Grade 12 student in Surrey, B.C., says she has helped hundreds of school-aged kids improve their literacy skills after starting a free program this year.
Helen Liu founded Tales with Teens, offering online workshops and boot camps, after noticing a growing reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) among her peers and what she saw as a decline in their critical thinking.
“It feels like the more I use [AI], the more I have to rely on it,” said Liu.
She said as AI is used by younger kids, who have yet to significantly develop literacy skills, it’s challenging for them to improve those skills down the line, and her program aims to combat that.
Earlier this month, McGill University associate professor Adam Dubé published an analysis finding that Canadian students who use AI every week scored roughly two years behind teens who never use AI.
His analysis drew on data from roughly 24,600 Canadian students from 897 schools who completed a recurring worldwide assessment of 15-year-olds’ math, science and reading abilities.
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Nineteen per cent of Canadian teens said they use AI every day in school to help them learn, while 21 per cent said they never or almost never use AI to help them learn.
Dubé said what’s “most concerning” is that 18 per cent of respondents in Canada say they use AI about once or twice a week to generate texts for assignments.
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Tales with Teens, supported by roughly 30 high school student volunteers, says it aims to help children develop their independent reasoning, and critical and creative thinking through discussions — like novel studies — workshops and guided lessons.
Since its first program this past January, Liu said more than 300 students have signed up.
One of them, Grade 7 Surrey student Shreya Banka, said a boot camp she did over the summer helped her identify underlying themes in media and literature, like foreshadowing.
“It really makes you think about things you would just ignore completely before,” she said.
Since its conception in January 2026, Tales with Teens has hosted three iterations of courses, workshops and boot camps. (Submitted by Helen Liu)
Banka said she’s seen her peers depend on AI for schoolwork, and thinks the program could help prevent her from becoming reliant on it as well.
Simon Fraser University professor Stuart Poyntz, whose research focuses on youth and media literacy, said as AI use in classrooms becomes more common, the Tales with Teens program is “incredibly encouraging.”
“Here you have a group of young people who are legitimately trying to create a program that aims to nurture a kind of critical analytic thinking that puts AI into view and calls it into question,” he said.
Stuart Poyntz is a professor with Simon Fraser University’s school of communication, and has published numerous journals on youth and media literacy. (Submitted by Stuart Poyntz)
Poyntz said learning is not easy, and struggle is inherent in thinking, but when students become reliant on AI to do that thinking for them, they risk losing opportunities to develop judgement, sequential reasoning, understanding and retention skills.
What’s on the other side of that struggle, Poyntz said, is a “sense of growing, of moving forward as a person.”
When AI is used to reproduce, summarize or generate content for learning assignments, Poyntz said that discourages “the development of young people’s voice.”
Liu said she hopes to grow her program further and reach more students.
