Building Early Years Innovation with AI
Source: https://oerc.ox.ac.uk/ai-centre/ai-centre-news/building-early-years-innovation-with-ai Parent: https://oerc.ox.ac.uk/ai-centre
08 Dec 2025
Building Early Years Innovation with AI
The AI Competency Centre recently supported a hackathon exploring how AI can support early years development
Students and researchers from the University of Oxford, Cambridge, UCL and beyond came together for a 24-hour early years innovation sprint hosted by Oxford Edge and Babyzone.
Over just 24 hours, teams moved from problem statements to working demos - and in one case, a live prototype deployed by 10.30am - exploring how AI can be used responsibly to support children and families in the first five years of life.
A key enabler of this was the AI Competency Centre at the University of Oxford, which acted as the sprint’s technical and tooling partner. By providing free access to API keys and AI tooling support, the Centre made it possible for teams to build and iterate at real-world speed.
Participants used tools such as Lovable, ChatGPT, Canva, Gemini and modern deployment platforms like Vercel to build and iterate quickly.
Responsible AI for the First Five Years
The sprint opened with a panel on “AI in Early Childhood Innovation”, bringing together founders, researchers and practitioners to explore how AI can be used safely and meaningfully with children:
- How to design AI experiences that are screen-light and relationship-heavy
- How to build for real children’s speech, frustration and neurodiversity
- How to ensure AI closes, rather than widens, gaps for under-served families
What the Teams Built
In less than a day, teams produced impressive prototypes tackling real early years challenges:
🏆 First Prize – SenseTies\ SenseTies reframed “challenging behaviour” as sensory processing difficulty. Their tool helps parents log triggers, spot patterns and receive personalised sensory support plans, which can be shared between home, nursery and other practitioners. Judges praised its clinical grounding, privacy-conscious design and scalability.
💡 Bonus Award – In-Between\ In-Between focused on the reality of overstretched parents who still want to be present with their children. The concept uses gentle prompts on a parent’s phone to turn everyday “in-between” moments – bus rides, walks, queues – into small pockets of imaginative play and connection, without adding to anyone’s to-do list.
Other standout ideas included:
- An AI storytelling app that turns family conflicts into age-appropriate stories and role-play prompts to build empathy and self-regulation.
- A sensory-rich early science app helping young children, including those with SEND, explore seasons, weather and plant growth through inclusive, interactive play.
Across the sprint, AI was used not to replace parenting, but to support better conversations, richer play and more tailored support around each child.
Thank you to the AI Competency Centre for being our technical and tooling partner, and for making this kind of responsible, hands-on innovation possible.
Thank you to the hackathon team for providing images and the above write-up.