After a year stuck, an AI coach called Get Physics Done found a Sun-dip path to Alpha Centauri in about a week. Slow down, swing closer than Mercury, fire near the Sun so panels stay small.

Kid Mission: Near-Star Map Challenge. Draw Earth, Sun, Alpha Centauri. Invent three paths. Pick one and say why it saves power or weight.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/09/01/1143247/ai-interstellar-journey-alpha-centauri/

A tiny robot duck learned to walk, get back up, and roller-skate. Not from a homework sheet. From practice.

Microduck, from Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics (Aug 27). Same family as Reachy Mini. Four crayon colors: Cream, Graphite, Lavender, Sky.

How it learns: reinforcement learning. Try. Score. Try again. Like a bike. Thousands of pretend ducks practice in a video-game Earth, then the winning moves go onto the real desk.

Kid Mission: Duck Coach Challenge. Write a robot recipe. Have someone follow it exactly. When they get stuck, change the recipe and try again.

https://pollen-robotics.com/microduck/blog/introducing-microduck/

Hey there, future builders! Have you ever wondered what's actually happening inside your tablet when you tap on a game, or inside your TV when a video starts playing? In this special episode, we shrink down, down, DOWN into a microchip to meet the tiny city hiding inside every gadget you own.

We'll explore:

• Logic gates: the LEGO-block light switches that flick ON and OFF billions of times a second

• The "multiply-accumulate" move that powers every video game and AI assistant

• Why moving data is the trickiest part, and how engineers avoid traffic jams

• Systolic arrays, the relay races inside AI chips

• Why every chip has a "heartbeat" called a clock cycle

• How a chip city is different from your brain

Whether it's the chip inside your tablet or a brand-new one you'll invent someday, the future is what you decide to prompt!

Kid Mission of the Week: The Chip City Challenge. Draw a square (your chip), fill it with little dots (your logic gates), draw arrows showing how data travels without making traffic jams, and label the heartbeat clock in the middle. You just designed a tiny city like a real chip engineer!