Kids’ drawings, code, research and videos are scattered across apps, school accounts and cloud drives. What happens to all of it as they grow up?
Editor’s note: This article draws on information provided by OpenRockets. TechCity independently checked its claims and added reporting. OpenRockets did not pay for this coverage and did not review the article before publication.
A child draws a picture on a tablet. A 13-year-old builds their first game. A 16-year-old uploads code to GitHub, enters a research paper in a school competition, or cuts a short film on their phone.
We file these under homework, hobbies or growing up. They are also creative works, and nearly all of them are digital. That raises a question earlier generations rarely had to think about: who keeps track of what children make online, who gets credit for it, and who decides what happens to it next?
A childhood spread across 20 platforms
Think about where one kid’s creative history might live right now. Early drawings on an old iPad. Videos on a parent’s phone. Science projects inside a school account that closes after graduation. Code on GitHub. Photos in Google Photos. A contest entry on a website that may not exist in ten years.
On its own, each file looks small. Together, they’re a record of how a person learned, tested ideas and got better at something.
The internet wasn’t built to hold that record for decades. Devices break. Passwords get forgotten. Platforms shut down. Google, for one, can delete a personal account that sits unused for two years, along with its Gmail, Drive and Photos files, under a policy that took effect in December 2023. When any of that happens, pieces of a creative childhood disappear without anyone noticing.
Kids already own their work. Keeping it is harder.
Ownership is the simpler part. In the US, the Copyright Office says minors can claim copyright and register their work, though state laws may govern business deals involving it. A 13-year-old owns the game they coded.
The hard part is everything around that ownership: proving who made something, keeping it findable, and controlling how others use it.
That’s the gap OpenRockets says it wants to fill. It’s a volunteer nonprofit started in 2024 by high school students in several countries, and its main project is OpenRockets Press, a publishing platform for young creators.
Press accepts research papers, photos, paintings, software, 3D models, inventions and other work. Accepted pieces can be given an Archival Resource Key, or ARK. An ARK works like a library call number for the internet: a permanent ID, developed and maintained by the California Digital Library, that’s meant to keep pointing to a piece of work even if the website hosting it changes.
Here’s why that matters. Saving a drawing to cloud storage keeps a file. Publishing it with a permanent ID keeps a record of who made it, when it existed and how someone can cite it later.
For a three-year-old’s drawing, that sounds like a lot. Twenty-five years later, it might not.
When someone wants to use a kid’s work
Preservation is one problem. Permission is another.
Say a 15-year-old publishes a useful piece of software. Can another developer change it? Can a company build it into a paid product? How should the teen get credit? And what happens to all of those answers when that teen turns 18?
Open source software already has well-known licenses that answer most of these questions. A license is the set of rules attached to a work that says what other people are allowed to do with it. OpenRockets argues that none of the existing ones were written with young creators in mind.
Its proposal is MAPLE 1.0, short for Minor Authors Public License for Expression, a software license built around work made by minors. The group also offers three licenses of its own, called Beaver, Kangaroo and Hummingbird.
Even if MAPLE never catches on, the idea behind it is worth taking seriously. As more kids learn coding, design, filmmaking and game development, platforms will have to treat young people as creators with rights, not only as users to protect.
AI makes the ownership question harder
Children are growing up with tools that can generate images, music, code, video and writing in seconds. A kid sketches a character and uses an app to animate it. A teenager builds an app with an AI coding assistant. Another mixes their own recordings with generated beats.
So who is the author?
In the US, there’s a partial answer. In January 2025, the Copyright Office reported that copyright still requires a human author. Typing prompts alone does not make someone the author of what an AI produces. The parts a person creates, changes by hand, or selects and arranges can still be protected.
For a young creator, that means the sketch is theirs. The animation the app generated from it may not be protectable by anyone. Most adults don’t know where that line sits yet, so it’s a lot to expect a 14-year-old to figure out alone.
There’s also the question of where uploaded work ends up. Since April 22, 2026, the FTC’s updated Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule, known as COPPA, has required apps and sites covered by the law to get separate parental consent before sharing a child’s personal information with outside companies for purposes like AI training. That protection covers kids under 13. Teens 13 to 17 aren’t covered by COPPA, and their uploads are often governed by whatever terms of service they tapped through.
Kids need more than tools for making things. They need a clear picture of what happens after they tap Upload.
Safer browsing without a tiny internet
OpenRockets is also working on Project Interkid, research into a web browser and search tool for children.
Parents know the tension. Open the whole internet to a child, and they can run into scams, explicit content and manipulation. Lock it down too hard, and the internet stops being the place where a curious kid can learn almost anything.
OpenRockets says Interkid uses a dataset of more than 40,000 phrases linked to scams and harmful content aimed at minors, with the goal of filtering out the worst material while leaving the wider web open. The real challenge isn’t building a separate kids’ internet. It’s helping children take part safely in the one that already exists.
What OpenRockets still has to prove
A good question doesn’t guarantee a good answer, so a few cautions.
A permanent ID only lasts as long as someone keeps the lights on. John Kunze, who helped create the ARK system at the California Digital Library, has written that persistence depends on the service behind an identifier, not the identifier itself. OpenRockets is a young, volunteer-run group making promises measured in decades. That depends on steady funding and a plan for when today’s students move on.
“Open source” has a strict definition. The Open Source Initiative says an open source license can’t discriminate against any person or group or restrict uses like business. A license that blocks commercial use or applies only to minors doesn’t meet that bar. OpenRockets’ own site calls its current licenses “semi-open source,” which is the more accurate label.
MAPLE is still a proposal. OpenRockets wants it recognized by SPDX, the standard catalog of license IDs that software tools use. SPDX’s rules say a license needs finished, stable text and real use in significant projects before it’s listed.
None of that makes OpenRockets a bad idea. It makes Press one good place to keep a copy, not the only one.
What families can do now
Sign in to any old Google account your child used, and download everything with Google Takeout. Export school accounts before a student graduates or switches schools. Photograph physical work and put the date and your child’s age in the file name. And if your teen shares code or art online, pick a license together so they decide the rules instead of a platform’s fine print.
The digital shoebox isn’t enough
Earlier generations kept drawings, photos and report cards in a box in the closet. Today’s version is split across a dozen apps, three devices and a few accounts nobody can log into.
That makes keeping things easier in theory and harder in practice. We could save nearly everything a child creates. Without a deliberate plan for who owns it, who gets credit and where it’s stored, families will likely end up with less than a shoebox ever held.
As childhood moves further online and deeper into AI, parents, schools, tech companies and lawmakers will have to see children’s digital work as more than files or homework.
It’s the start of someone’s creative history.
