Code and a Code of Honor: Why Tomorrow's Technology Needs Firm Educational Values

Every scout camp has a quiet moment we love. The young people stand in a circle, and one of them raises a hand to say the Promise for the first time. It's only a few words, but they know those words commit them to something. They know someone will ask them about it tomorrow.

We write code during the day and sit in these circles in the evening. Over time, one question kept coming back to us: why do we ask a twelve-year-old to keep a code of honor, but ask nothing like it of the software they talk to every day?

The tool is no longer neutral

We used to say technology is just a tool, and what matters is how we use it. That's no longer enough. AI doesn't simply wait to be used. It suggests, answers, reassures, and sometimes decides.

And young people are already using it. In a Pew Research Center survey of 1,458 U.S. teens, 54% said they had used chatbots for help with schoolwork, and 12% said they had turned to them for emotional support or advice ^[6].

That second number deserves a pause. A teenager looks for advice in a vulnerable moment and finds a machine answering. What will it say? And who decided?

In a scout troop, we don't let a young person share their worries with someone we don't know. We choose leaders carefully, train them, and set clear rules for every meeting. Yet the machine that same young person talks to alone in their room at night has been vetted by none of us, and we don't know who wrote its instructions.

Another study, from Common Sense Media, found that 72% of teens had used an AI companion at least once. About a third of teen users said something an AI companion said or did made them uncomfortable ^[5].

In the wider picture, the AI Incident Database recorded 233 incidents in 2024, a 56.4% increase over the year before, according to the Stanford AI Index ^[4].

These numbers aren't a reason to fear technology. They mean the tool now carries values, whether we like it or not. The real question is: whose values?

The world is writing rules. What about us?

The good news is that the world has started writing rules. In 2021, UNESCO's 193 member states adopted the first global standard on the ethics of AI ^[1].

In December 2025, UNICEF published version 3.0 of its guidance on AI and children. It sets out ten requirements, including children's safety, their data and privacy, transparency, and their best interests and development ^[2].

The EU AI Act goes further. Its Article 5 prohibits AI systems that exploit people's vulnerabilities due to their age, and that ban has applied since 2 February 2025 ^[3].

These texts matter. But we know from our work in education that a text alone doesn't shape behavior. A law tells you what you may not do. Education builds in you the reasons you wouldn't want to do it in the first place.

This is where we think the Scout Movement holds something the tech industry needs. World Scouting engages more than 60 million young people and volunteers, across 176 National Scout Organizations ^[7]. All of them started at the same point: a short promise and a clear law.

What the Promise and Law teach a programmer

The Scout Promise doesn't open with a list of prohibitions. It opens with a commitment. And the Scout Law doesn't say "don't lie." It says a scout is trustworthy, and that their honor is to be trusted.

The difference is small in words and large in design. When we build a product on a list of prohibitions, we bolt on the limits at the end, like a patch. When we build it on a commitment, values become part of the very first decision.

Take trust. A scout is trusted because they don't take more than they need and don't claim what isn't theirs. That's exactly what we want from any tool that deals with young people.

When we built the Google Calendar integration in "Smart Scout Manager," we could have asked for full access to a leader's calendar. That would have been easier to code. Instead we chose the narrowest scope available, which only manages calendars the app itself creates (calendar.app.created). We don't see the leader's private appointments, and we don't need to.

On the same platform we included child-protection guides, because a leader running a group of children needs those before any other feature.

With "eNaawah" we made a similar call. User data stays in the browser, and we don't ask anyone to create an account. Someone writing an obituary notice for a loved one shouldn't have to hand us their email address.

Letting AI know its limits

There's a meaning in the Scout Law we keep coming back to: know your role and do it well. A leader doesn't do everything for the young people. They guide, and leave room for them to learn.

We apply this to AI itself. In "Kashef," our website security audit platform, the AI doesn't compute the security score. The score comes from fixed rules that can be reviewed and repeated, so the same site gets the same result every time.

The AI's job there is to explain. It takes the technical result and turns it into language the site owner understands. That's a useful role, but it isn't the referee's role.

Why does this matter to us? Because a language model can give you two different answers to the same question. That's acceptable in an explanation and unacceptable in a verdict. When we mix the two roles, we lose trust.

We do the same with "Najem," our AI assistant on Telegram. We built it on the curricula of the Muslim Scouts Association and Lebanese scouting, so it turns the Promise, the Law and scout values into practical activities a leader can run with their group. Today more than 1,500 leaders in over 12 countries use it.

But Najem doesn't raise children. The leader does. Najem might suggest an activity on honesty and explain how to run it, then leave it to the leader to read the faces in front of them and decide. The tool serves the educator; it doesn't replace them.

There's another reason we built it on the curricula rather than on the model's general knowledge. A language model learned from the whole internet, the good and the bad. When a leader asks it about a value like selflessness, we want the answer to come from an educational source reviewed by leaders and educators, not from the first text the model happened to see. That way, the values Najem offers stay the same values we teach at camp.

A small charter for anyone building tech for young people

We don't claim to have the full answer. But we've gathered what we've learned into a few principles, and we try to keep them the way we keep the Promise:

1. Ask for the least you need. Every extra permission is trust nobody gave you.
2. Know the AI's role. It explains, suggests and assists. Decisions that need consistency and fairness stay with clear rules or with a person.
3. Put child protection before features. If children use the platform, the safeguarding guide ships in version one, not version ten.
4. Keep the human educator at the center. The tool serves the leader, the parent and the teacher; it doesn't go around them to the child.
5. Be honest about what the tool is. Don't let it pretend to be a friend or a person.
6. Leave data with its owner whenever you can. What you don't collect can't leak.
7. Build values from the source. If you have trusted educational curricula, make them the knowledge base. Don't let the model improvise values.

None of these principles is new. Most of them appear in the UNICEF and UNESCO guidance in other words ^[1][2]. What's different is that we see them from the campsite: a daily commitment, not a document pinned to a wall.

From the circle to the repository

What we suggest is simple. Before you write the first line of a project aimed at young people, write the product's "promise." Three or four sentences stating what the tool commits to for the people who use it.

Put it in the first file of the repository. Return to it whenever you add a feature, request a new permission, or give the AI a new role. Ask yourself: does this honor the promise?

If you work with a team, read it together, the way a scout troop reads its Law. It will feel odd at first, then it becomes a habit, and then it becomes a culture.

Good code works. Code that carries a code of honor deserves to be trusted.