Something big is happening in the world right now, and most people your age are only using it to scroll. In the next eight weeks you're going to learn the skills that school never sits down to teach: typing at the speed of thought, building documents that earn marks on sight, commanding AI instead of being fooled by it, researching like a professional, and actually building and shipping things on the internet. Everything gets measured today, and re-measured in Week 8 — so the growth will be undeniable. Welcome to Digi Camp. Let's begin.
1The mission — eight weeks, one pipeline
Every week stacks onto the last. By the showcase you'll have a portfolio: real things you made, and numbers that went up.
By Week 8 you will own: a measured WPM gain, a distinction-grade write-up with an automatic table of contents, two or more apps you built by prompting AI, an AI-generated poster for your own work, and a spot in the showcase. Not one of those exists yet. All of them will.
Everyone here moves quickly. Primary or secondary, if you're in this room it's because you can keep up. When I say "do it and report back", you do it and report back. That rhythm is the whole camp.
2Your starting numbers
You can't celebrate growth you never measured. Two baselines, right now: your Digital Skills score and your typing speed.
📋 Baseline 1 — the Digital Skills Diagnostic
Twelve questions, set at Week-8 standard — precise, technical, unforgiving. Most people fail this today. That's the design. You'll take this exact diagnostic again in Week 8 and watch it feel easy.
⌨️ Baseline 2 — your first WPM benchmark
Run the 60-second sprint in the trainer below (section 3), then make it official in Kairu's Keys — the camp's typing tool. Its benchmark posts to the leaderboard and its daily streak is your homework habit. Record today's number here so Week 8 can embarrass it:
3Touch typing, grilled
This is the spine of the whole camp. Every other skill rides on it. We drill it every single week until 60 WPM stops being scary.
Posture: back straight, feet flat, screen at eye level, wrists floating (not resting).
Home row: left fingers on A S D F, right fingers on J K L ; — feel the bumps on F and J. Thumbs on the space bar.
The golden rule: eyes on the screen, never the keys. Slow with eyes up beats fast looking down, because eyes-up gets faster forever and looking down never does.
We go around the room: home row drill → report your accuracy. Common words → report. Eyes-up sentence → report. Then everyone runs the 60-second sprint and calls out their number for the board. Whatever your number is today, it is a starting line, not a judgement. The only embarrassing WPM in this camp is one that never improves.
4Talk like a techie — the Week-1 lexicon
Twelve terms we now use like professionals. Tap a card to flip it, read it, then mark yourself honestly — a "learning it" today becomes a "knew it" by Friday.
5kerwinspringer.com — your unfair advantage
This camp runs hand in hand with the site. Whoever you are — primary, secondary, repeater, private candidate, or a parent — there's a lane built for you.
| Stop | What it does | Who it's for |
|---|---|---|
| Tools | Interactive study apps, including Kairu's Keys (your typing homework lives here) | Everyone |
| Past Papers | Real exam papers to download and drill | Secondary, repeaters, private candidates |
| MCQ Practice | Multiple-choice drilling with instant feedback, question by question | CSEC students especially |
| Exam Room | Timed tests that mark themselves and show your level | Anyone facing an exam |
| KS Notes | Interactive class notes (you're inside one right now) | Student Hub members |
| SEA tools | Practice and readiness checks for the primary exam years | Primary students & parents |
Now prove you were paying attention. Open the site in another tab, explore, and answer:
6🤖 AI 101 — meet the arsenal (a taste)
Twenty tools, six categories, one wall. Today your only job is to recognise the names — Week 3 is when we learn to command them.
People act like AI fell out of the sky in 2022. Not quite. The question is old — Alan Turing asked "can machines think?" back in 1950 — and machines have been "learning" in labs for decades. The modern explosion has one hinge: in 2017, researchers at Google published a design called the transformer — the blueprint that lets a machine read basically the whole internet and learn how language itself works. Train a transformer on nearly everything humans have ever written and you get an LLM — a large language model.
Then came the moment. November 2022: OpenAI took an LLM and put it in a chat box — ChatGPT — and it became the fastest app in history to reach 100 million users. Every big tech company on the planet sprinted after it. That's why every tool on the wall below feels like it arrived at the same time — because it did.
And here's why this matters to you. Every single tool on this wall has a free tier. A student in Trinidad or Guyana with a phone and data has the same arsenal as a student in Silicon Valley. That has never been true before — not with books, not with labs, not with anything. That's the revolution this camp keeps talking about.
This was just the tour bus driving past. Week 3 — The AI Arsenal — is where we stop and get out: the full map of AI, the free-tier stack, and how to prompt like you mean it. Week 4 we go creative (images, video, the Prompt-Off tournament). Week 7 we level up vibe coding — and learn its dangers. Today's only job: get your free account (charge item 2) so you're armed and ready.
7The Ten Commandments for the Modern Student
Everything this camp stands for, in ten laws. We reveal them one at a time — and they follow you for eight weeks.
Commandments 1 and 2 are this week's. Stand, say them out loud, mean them: "Thou shalt not watch thy keys. Thou shalt type faster than thou thinkest." Every week opens with the commandment we're living that session.
8The charge — this week you become a builder
Homework in Digi Camp is never busywork. This week you ship your first two creations.
1. Type daily. Kairu's Keys, every day, keep the streak alive. Ten focused minutes beats one long Sunday panic.
2. Get a free AI. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Copilot — the free tier is plenty. Under 13? A parent creates and supervises the account; that's the deal.
3. Build TWO things by prompting — single-file HTML, no coding knowledge needed:
• Something useful: a study timer, flashcard app, quiz for your little cousin, chore tracker…
• Something fun: a game, a soundboard, a birthday card that explodes with confetti…
4. Polish them all week and bring both to Class 2 — first demos go on the projector.
🪄 Starter prompts — copy, paste, then make them yours
💾 From AI answer to real app — the part nobody teaches
Step 1: ask the AI for the app and let it finish writing the code. Ask it to "put everything in ONE file".
Step 2: press the Copy code button on the code block (copy ALL of it, from <!doctype html> to </html>).
Step 3: open a plain text editor — Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on Mac (Format → Make Plain Text first!).
Step 4: paste, then save the file as myapp.html — the name can be anything, the ending must be .html.
Step 5: double-click the file. It opens in your browser. You just shipped software.
Something broke? Copy the error or describe what's wrong, paste it back to the AI, and say "fix it". Debugging is a conversation.
9📬 Hand in your homework
Your weekly build gets handed in right here — you'll get a receipt, and you can replace it any time before the deadline.
🎯 The takeaway
- Digi Camp is eight weeks with one pipeline: type it → write it → AI it → verify it → chart it → build it → ship it → show it. Everything is measured today and re-measured in Week 8.
- Typing is the spine: home row, eyes up, every day in Kairu's Keys. Your baseline WPM is a starting line, not a judgement.
- kerwinspringer.com is your unfair advantage — Tools, Past Papers, MCQ Practice, the Exam Room and these Notes, all pulling in one direction.
- The Ten Commandments now apply. This week: thou shalt not watch thy keys, and thou shalt type faster than thou thinkest.
- The charge: free AI in hand, two single-file HTML creations — one useful, one fun — polished and ready to demo in Class 2.
- Next class: Docs Mastery — the write-up tricks (automatic tables of contents, page breaks, self-building references) that quietly earn marks.