This summer in Los Angeles, dozens of children ages 5 to 17 will attend the third-ever session of Crypto Kids Camp, where they’ll learn about everything from artificial intelligence to virtual reality using hands-on games and activities. (The camp was scheduled to take place this week during the April public school break, but due to a construction issue in their space, it’s been rescheduled for summer.) It’s part of a burgeoning cottage industry made up of camps, startups, and video content devoted to educating the next generation about Web3, sometimes even before they can read.

According to founder Najah Roberts, the camp is a way to lessen the wealth gap between privileged kids and underserved communities. “It’s important to catch our kids when they’re young to help them open their minds to what the possibilities are,” she says. “You can tell them that there are jobs in tech, but when they actually know that they can create those jobs, those platforms, those games, you see their minds open.”

The weeklong camp, which costs $500, divides kids into four age groups and has them spend a set amount of time on different tech modules that follow the acronym Beastmode (that’s blockchain, evolution of money, artificial intelligence, security/cyber, technology/virtual reality, mining and machine learning, online gaming, drones, and engineering). Some parents pay for it, but kids from poorer backgrounds may be eligible to receive a scholarship. Attending kids receive a laptop, a drone, a robot, a VR headset, and a phone with a crypto wallet, all of which they get to keep. “It’s like Christmas,” says Roberts of the day when the campers receive their wallets. “They’re stoked.” She has big plans: By this summer, Crypto Kids Camp plans to operate in six states, and by fall, there are expected to be 41 locations nationwide.

It isn’t the only kids’ camp devoted to the subject; similar programs exist at the University of Pennsylvania and other colleges across the country; in Miami; and, naturally, online. Children’s media has also capitalized on Web3: Zigazoo, a TikTok-like platform for ages 3 to 12, is releasing NFT collaborations with recognizable YouTube sensations Cocomelon, Blippi, and Serena Williams’ Qai Qai universe. “We’re trying to teach kids about digital and financial literacy and empower them to create their own art and go build the future of the web,” says Zigazoo founder Zak Ringelstein. Also part of this brave new world: crypto-only virtual piggy banks for kids, books and YouTube explainers with titles like “C Is for Cryptocurrency,” and an NFT-based kids’ TV show starring tiny plush cactuses.

Crypto-for-kids initiatives often tout themselves as being on the forefront of education and preparing future workers for lucrative jobs in tech. Part of the draw of these programs for parents, to be sure, is to compensate for the largely absent personal finance education offered at most public schools in the US. But undergirding this still relatively new industry is the question of whether cryptocurrency and blockchain actually is the future people should be preparing their children for. There are plenty of valid reasons to believe that Web3 in general rests on shaky technology and promises that sound great on paper but don’t work in practice, not to mention that the risk of getting rug-pulled by an NFT project or scammed by a meme coin creator is much higher than investments in traditional financial products. Perhaps, some have argued, that what kids need is better education about more stable methods of investing.

“I find it actually a little frightening to hear that there’s this industry out there socializing very young children about very risky products,” says Joyce Serido, a professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota who studies financial behaviors within families. She’s an advocate for teaching children about money as early as possible, but worries that cryptocurrency is still too volatile and untested to be understood by kids. “You can explain that for every one person that [hits the jackpot] there are 1,000 who lose it all, but that doesn’t resonate with a 15- or an 18-year-old,” she says. “They’re thinking ‘I’m going to be the one who makes it.’” Her advice: “Give them $5 to invest in crypto or have them play a stock market simulation game to limit the losses. And when they lose, it’ll be a very good lesson.”

Serido’s first recommendation for teaching kids about money, however, aligns with Crypto Kids Camp’s: Start with something tangible, like physical currency that can help show that money is a finite resource. But, she says, “the second lesson, which is probably the most important, is that what you’re really trying to help your children learn is self-regulation” — basically, they need impulse control. Another crucial aspect is to ensure they learn from reliable sources; it’s harder to vet information coming from YouTube, anonymous message boards, or their peers.

Teachers say they are noticing their students spending more time on platforms like Robinhood, where people can buy and trade crypto. Though technically it’s only available to adults 18 or over, some teenagers use an account a parent has set up for them, and many crypto wallets have no age limits at all. Nate, a teacher in Virginia who asked not to include his last name for concerns over future employment, says that over the last two years, he’s watched his high school students develop major interest in crypto, stock trading, and sports gambling. During study hall, he’d glance at their screens — all of them boys — and see the temperamental fluctuations of the Robinhood line graph or the FanDuel home page. He’s heard one story from a fellow teacher about a ninth grader at another school who made a bet on a college football game and won $500,000, then had to pretend that his father had actually made the bet.

Zigazoo’s first NFT collection is with 13-year-old NFT creator Nyla Hayes.

Zigazoo

Nate says he can usually tell when a kid might be getting into some potentially risky financial habits: “Once they start fanboying Elon Musk, you’ve probably got a kid who’s interested in these things,” he says. He’s also noticing that middle school students are responding to the fervor around NFTs without understanding what they are; during one project in a class on technology that involved AI-generated art, “there were a number of sixth grade boys that were elated to see that you could turn the art into an NFT and sell it,” he says. “They knew it was cool and trendy and their ears perked up.”

It makes sense, considering the media frenzies over kids like British 12-year-old Benyamin Ahmed, who made more than $400,000 in two months selling NFTs of pixelated whales, or the pair of 14- and 9-year-old siblings who make $30,000 per month mining bitcoin. This is the world that Gen Z and Gen Alpha have been raised in: a world where entrepreneurs are lauded as heroes, where a magazine called Teen Bo$$ exists, and where making money is a hobby. “I am fascinated by how advanced these young children are about these emerging technologies,” says Serido. But, she adds, “our mission is to help them navigate the world they will inherit, a world we don’t understand and we’re not going to be here to see.”

It’s too soon to tell if Web3 is the answer. But Najah Roberts and other educators are betting it will be, and they want kids to be prepared. “We started off educating adults,” she says, “and then we started realizing our kids really need this. STEM and STEAM are missing it big time. Everybody wants to talk about coding, which is great, but then what? We want to make sure that our children are getting the same education as the adults are getting, but even at a more rapid pace. Because they are the future.”

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Off in the distance was a rocket appearing no bigger than a grain of rice. One member of the party noted that the marshy grasses skirting the view on this February day were much taller than at the last launch.

A smoke plume enveloped the Antares rocket but only for a moment. The bleachers, a couple of miles from the launchpad, vibrated — a drumroll for the capsule headed to the International Space Station. The rocket soon emerged from the cloud, scaling the sky, until it shrank out of sight.

Quite a 21st-century fireworks show for a bucolic area of Victorian farmhouses and roaming wild ponies. How did the tiny barrier island, of all places, become a NASA launch site, a newcomer asked Patrick O’Neill, an International Space Station spokesman.

Tweet may have been deleted

“I really don’t know,” he said. “My assumption is when you are on a coastline like this, when you launch out, you’re not doing it over top of a heavily populated area.”

Perhaps little-known to the space fans accustomed to rockets blasting off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, or the Central California coast, Wallops Island has been a steadfast force since the waning days of World War II. It began as a small testing range for guided missiles a decade before NASA formed. Today, its bread and butter are sounding rockets (small research rockets that only briefly visit space), drones, and high-altitude scientific balloons that float to the edge of space. Uncrewed cargo missions for the space station, provided by Northrop Grumman, fly from the site about twice a year.

But in the coming years, Wallops will play a greater role in the blooming commercial spaceflight industry. The Virginia site is NASA’s only owned rocket launch range for suborbital and orbital rockets. Over the next eight years, the space agency expects the facility to grow from flying two or three orbital launches per year to over 20. The complex is bracing for the Artemis missions to the moon, which will launch directly to the lunar surface and support astronauts.

Through new commercial partnerships, it could even go interplanetary, hosting the first private missions to Venus.

This week Rocket Lab, a New Zealand-based company nipping at the heels of SpaceX, announced it would build a 250,000-square-foot factory at the Virginia outpost for its new Neutron rocket, a 130-foot, medium-lift vehicle designed to return to its launchpad and be fully reused.

The company has dubbed it a rocket for 2050. Reams of carbon composite material for the rocket will be made with robotics.

That’s a far cry from the scrappy early days of Wallops 70 years ago, when the only way to get on the island was by ferry. The launch platform consisted of a 50-by-50-foot concrete slab, with an observation station covered in sandbags. “Offices” were little more than five wooden shacks and some sheds.

The Neutron pad will be in addition to the company’s other new Wallops-based pad for the Electron rocket, a smaller 59-foot vehicle intended for launching small satellites. The Electron is expected to fly from Virginia soil later this year, while Neutron’s maiden voyage is planned for 2024.

The Neutron deal will come with about $45 million in assistance from the state and Virginia Space, the state-established entity that runs the commercial activity at Wallops.

“We love Wallops, actually,” Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, told Mashable. “You know, up at Cape [Canaveral], it’s a very, very busy launch site. Having quite a bit of a quieter place to go about your businesses is certainly a huge advantage.”

“Having quite a bit of a quieter place to go about your businesses is certainly a huge advantage.”

The schedule isn’t the only advantage for turning around quick orders for Rocket Lab’s defense and commercial customers. Beck wanted a launch site where he could also set up a rocket manufacturing facility. The eventual goal is to launch a rocket a month. Amid the new Space Age boom, the buildable areas around the busier launch sites are already crowded, he said.

“A rocket is generally sized by the lowest bridge between California and the launch site of California — and [for] Florida,” he said. “To me, that was never a good engineering constraint to labor upon yourself, the height of a bridge built in the 1950s. So, the way to solve that problem was just build the factory beside the launch site.”

Neutron is designed to carry an eight-ton payload and might one day fly astronauts, something that its small predecessor, Electron, could never do. It’s made of a carbon composite shell that is lightweight and durable for the heat and pressure of repeated spaceflights. It’s bulkier at the base than other sticklike rockets so that it can both balance on its own legs before launch and when it lands. That eliminates the need for launch towers.

The new shape isn’t about looking cool. It’s about cost, Beck said. Landing on a barge at sea could take three days to tow back. Bringing the vehicle directly to the launchpad reduces the time and money needed to service the rocket for the next order.

“This is going to have a lasting impact for years and years and years to come.”

Rocket Lab brings with it the prestige of being involved with CAPSTONE, a precursor mission for NASA’s Artemis moonbound flights. The space agency selected Rocket Lab’s spacecraft to test out the lunar orbit where it wants Gateway, a planned space station to serve lunar missions, to reside. Wallops was originally slated to host that mission, but it is still awaiting a key NASA certification.

What’s more, Rocket Lab has an exciting planetary mission fast approaching: The company will carry out the first privately funded mission to Venus next year. Through a collaboration with MIT, Georgia Tech, Caltech, Purdue University, and the Planetary Science Institute, the expedition will send a 55-pound probe on an Electron rocket for a five-month voyage. The spacecraft will dip into the thick Venusian clouds for a few minutes. Scientists are interested in the chemistry occurring in Venus’ atmosphere following a controversial study that suggested phosphine, a possible sign of microbial life, lurked in the clouds.

Though that launch could take off from New Zealand like the lunar orbit mission, the Virginia site is in the mix, Beck said. The decision will largely hinge on scheduling and how busy the launchpads are.

So things may not stay “quiet” at Wallops for long. Having Rocket Lab as an anchor tenant of the adjacent research business park will draw more companies, said David Pierce, NASA director of the flight facility.

The state investments into building the new launch pad and control center for Neutron will be able to serve other customers, too. With 6,000 acres at the Wallops complex, there’s room for more development.

“This is going to have a lasting impact for years and years and years to come,” Pierce said.

One of those impacts will be the addition of rocket return viewings around the little island, a spectacle that is expected to be far less noisy than when the vehicle vaults into the sky.

Neutron only needs one engine to light just before it lands. It won’t even require a braking burn on the way down because of its aerodynamic shape and features. Beck guarantees the addition of rocket landings to Wallops will remain “quiet.”

“We would hope that it would be very graceful,” Beck said.

The e-trike was announced at electric vehicle maker Arcimoto’s new product event Tuesday and shows how a three-wheeled device can be as thrilling as a regular e-scooter. But it features a lot more tilting and self-charging than your average ride.

The MLM features a pedal generator so you can sit on the e-trike while its stationary and charge up the battery for later riding. All juiced up, Arcimoto says it can last for more than 200 miles and that the ride feels as smooth and stable as a bicycle despite all the titling and leaning — even while braking. Each of the three corners of the trike has its own electric motor, and the weight distribution likely improves the trike’s stability.

Arcimoto is known for its other types of three-wheelers, including its “fun utility vehicle” that can hit 75 mph despite its small, golf-cart like size. Like the FUV, the MLM can fit up to two riders both leaning together.

While it’s available for preorder with a $100 fee, specifics like final price will be announced closer to its summer launch.