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Hacker News
Alex, thanks for building this. I imagine it will help many children!
Couple comments on this being 'screen' oriented, which are as you say endemic in schools and terrible.
There's a fair amount of research that paper reading and handling and writing gets significantly higher retention than screen reading. Most especially physically writing notes, but generally comprehension is just higher for paper. Interestingly e-ink is in the middle between screens and paper.
VLMs offer the interesting possibility of 'looking over the shoulder' of students as they work examples and problems by hand through a camera. It's a harder lift, and it's more expensive, but it might find much higher buy-in to think about a combo book / workbook / AI tutor business model, not least because if you talk to almost any parent or teacher they will tell you that they are extremely worried about genz/alpha kids' abilities to focus, read with attention for longer periods of time or handwrite.
Many of the exercises can be evaluated through a VLM pretty much as easily as in a chat window -- more expensive inference, but possibly a much better world.
A middle ground here might be experimenting with something like a remarkable tablet - it's relatively easy to vibe code a responsive eink page right now, and you could do away with the camera side. I guess I'd think of pairing it with a phone app to talk that could hook up to the remarkable.
My pet theory on handwriting notes and why they're so much better than typing or just listening - if not in shorthand, they are too slow to capture lectures word for word, and thus force a first summarization/categorization step, meaning stuff has to literally go in to short term memory then get pulled out and processed; this just has to be better than typing in a sort of fast typing haze and trying to read them later. It's also the reason my college notebooks have things like (WTF?? <---) next to notes -- I was trying to synthesize and couldn't in the moment. In addition to all this, I understand brain scans show quite a high percentage of the brain gets involved when drawing/handwriting notes -- you have micro and macro muscle movements plus all the cognitive and visual tasks together.
At any rate, it will be a great service to learners to have a quality AI tutor, and I'd pitch you on looking seriously at e-ink or paper modalities if you want to help students learn even better and faster. The tech is SUUUPER close right now, or even could be there with a little willpower.
by vessenes
For education, isn't the problem we are trying to solve the one with motivation, values and emotional handling? The tools, play a part, but it is engulfed by the real problem mentioned before. How are you going to deal with it?
by orsenthil
Hey first of all, Congratulations on the launch. I'm a teacher at a Dutch applied university where we use mastery learning to teach students software development, the code for our learning system is open source so feel free to take a look [1].
I personally always followed traditional schooling but programs like flip the classroom or https://www.khanacademy.org/ really helped me and I now also see the same value in my own teaching and your work so thanks for working on this.
At my program we have experimented a lot with teacher bots, AI grading, using AI to generate assignments and other forms of AI but in the end we always came back to 1on1 feedback sessions and ditched the AI to be just an optional tool. In a teacher feedback session a teacher would open the work of the student and grade the work based on how much of the objective was reached. In our experience students will find the tools to not do there homework and that is more than fine as long as they understand what they are doing. We eventually settled on 1 or 2 day exams without AI. Screen recording as proof. Where you get graded on the same objectives and can use any trick you have learned. Assignments typically take 1 day to compleet. Assignments need to be redone if a student scores less than 80%. On the exam often 55% is a passing grade.
So some of the things that pointed out to me where: 90% correct sounds really high. A lot of AI access sounds like a lot of trouble shooting to find the right amount and per student this amount may be different. We for example see that some students do better with AI and others learn less. Students may also ask AI outside of bloomy and I could not find how that is precisely handled. Lastly the course sounds very independent. Are there any group projects or assignments that can be done together. We are for example currently exploring adding tags to assignments to indicate you could pair a programming assignment or that you could pair with AI.
[1]: https://sd42.nl/
by timostrating
First of all congrats on the launch.
I worked at an edtech startup with adaptive learning platforms in previous decades. One thing that is always difficult to surmount was that at the under K12 level were:
1. B2b it was hard to land large contracts(like getting an entire public school district to jump from large publishers like HMH or Wiley) because it turned out that the teachers themselves did not care about adaptivity when they had a thousand other things to worry about. But teachers are not the ones that make the deals. It's the school district board and The reps at large publishing just said we are also adaptive and no one would care about how you differentiated. Teachers and students really aren't the lot you have to convince in a b2b deal do you :)?
2. If you want the b2c route then the customer acquisition cost was way too high because again like to get teachers and students to actually adopt this to help them was really a hard sell, especially when the public school system has teachers that are so overburdened with other stuff.
I see that you mentioned charter schools for your pilot, which are not exactly public schools but I dunno of they come with the same set of challenges, but I wonder are these above two challenges are Also something you have had to face while scaling your product?
by ghm2199
Congrats on the launch! I'm curious if you're familiar with ED Hirsch's work and if so how you see a "core knowledge" curriculum fitting into AI-enabled tutoring. Your landing page suggests you might be falling into traditional anti-patterns for strengthening reading skills like "finding the main idea" and "close reading" of the text (your ai tutor animation instructs a student to look closely for the answer). These patterns are commonly used in American education and have largely been discredited. They persist due to outdated learning theory taught in American educational schools and are likely responsible for our falling reading scores. I'm bringing this up because my hope is that any ed tech tool regardless of whether it uses AI would start with the right foundational theory.
by rhaynes
Article Title: Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/01/22/ed-tech-i...
So, professional educator here, with fifteen years of high school teaching experience. If the sample passages and questions on the front page accurately reflect what's inside this, I would not let my kids go anywhere near it.
You've chosen to use the most generic AI-generated prose, when you could have licensed or hired writers to craft thoughtful, rich passages. I doubt you've consulted any serious standardized test item writers in the construction of what is essentially a standardized test item-based curriculum. This is the pedagogical equivalent of a Lunchable--mass produced, wrapped in plastic, and basically nutrition-free.
I am here to tell you HELL YES and TAKE MY MONEY. I am such a fan of the idea of using AI to help give personalized and structured AI lessons in the hands of students and let them cook!
- It looks like you are gating family access to K-3 for now and I think that's right. I wouldn't really be comfortable giving my first-grader a live chatbot. Maybe I would think about whether there are other non-persona modalities that could still be self-directed (i.e. I am uncomfortable with a chatbot interface on this for a six year old but gamified flash cards with options could be different).
- I think the other issue is with motivation. I have various duct-tape versions of these types of agents and the thing about it is if you're doing the learning right it can be HARD. So I would think about using motivational interviewing or other techniques to help keep the user coming back and motivated.
- I would really think about the assessments here too. Many people are worried about LLMs ruining student evaluations, but if you could bake in reliable, flexible exams that gauge user progress (even for something like a "Did you read this" quiz) I would bet teachers would like it. There is likely so much you could do on student progress observability and e.g. structuring team-based projects or having targeted student working groups to hash out hard concepts in a targeted way, etc.
This is such an interesting market and use case too because the educational system might be very structurally set up to the current pedagogical staffing model (think about the incentives for teacher's unions and administrators). If you think it will be hard to change that system as quickly as you want I would also try to have an offering direct to families / home-schoolers. I think there is also a cottage industry of tutors that might benefit. Maybe partnering with the textbook publishers? I'm sure there are some "Teach your kids better" influencers that would get you into some feeds?
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- Hacker News
- Alex, thanks for building this. I imagine it will help many children!
Couple comments on this being 'screen' oriented, which are as you say endemic in schools and terrible.
There's a fair amount of research that paper reading and handling and writing gets significantly higher retention than screen reading. Most especially physically writing notes, but generally comprehension is just higher for paper. Interestingly e-ink is in the middle between screens and paper.
VLMs offer the interesting possibility of 'looking over the shoulder' of students as they work examples and problems by hand through a camera. It's a harder lift, and it's more expensive, but it might find much higher buy-in to think about a combo book / workbook / AI tutor business model, not least because if you talk to almost any parent or teacher they will tell you that they are extremely worried about genz/alpha kids' abilities to focus, read with attention for longer periods of time or handwrite.
Many of the exercises can be evaluated through a VLM pretty much as easily as in a chat window -- more expensive inference, but possibly a much better world.
A middle ground here might be experimenting with something like a remarkable tablet - it's relatively easy to vibe code a responsive eink page right now, and you could do away with the camera side. I guess I'd think of pairing it with a phone app to talk that could hook up to the remarkable.
My pet theory on handwriting notes and why they're so much better than typing or just listening - if not in shorthand, they are too slow to capture lectures word for word, and thus force a first summarization/categorization step, meaning stuff has to literally go in to short term memory then get pulled out and processed; this just has to be better than typing in a sort of fast typing haze and trying to read them later. It's also the reason my college notebooks have things like (WTF?? <---) next to notes -- I was trying to synthesize and couldn't in the moment. In addition to all this, I understand brain scans show quite a high percentage of the brain gets involved when drawing/handwriting notes -- you have micro and macro muscle movements plus all the cognitive and visual tasks together.
At any rate, it will be a great service to learners to have a quality AI tutor, and I'd pitch you on looking seriously at e-ink or paper modalities if you want to help students learn even better and faster. The tech is SUUUPER close right now, or even could be there with a little willpower.
by vessenes - For education, isn't the problem we are trying to solve the one with motivation, values and emotional handling? The tools, play a part, but it is engulfed by the real problem mentioned before. How are you going to deal with it?by orsenthil
- Hey first of all, Congratulations on the launch. I'm a teacher at a Dutch applied university where we use mastery learning to teach students software development, the code for our learning system is open source so feel free to take a look [1].
I personally always followed traditional schooling but programs like flip the classroom or https://www.khanacademy.org/ really helped me and I now also see the same value in my own teaching and your work so thanks for working on this.
At my program we have experimented a lot with teacher bots, AI grading, using AI to generate assignments and other forms of AI but in the end we always came back to 1on1 feedback sessions and ditched the AI to be just an optional tool. In a teacher feedback session a teacher would open the work of the student and grade the work based on how much of the objective was reached. In our experience students will find the tools to not do there homework and that is more than fine as long as they understand what they are doing. We eventually settled on 1 or 2 day exams without AI. Screen recording as proof. Where you get graded on the same objectives and can use any trick you have learned. Assignments typically take 1 day to compleet. Assignments need to be redone if a student scores less than 80%. On the exam often 55% is a passing grade.
So some of the things that pointed out to me where: 90% correct sounds really high. A lot of AI access sounds like a lot of trouble shooting to find the right amount and per student this amount may be different. We for example see that some students do better with AI and others learn less. Students may also ask AI outside of bloomy and I could not find how that is precisely handled. Lastly the course sounds very independent. Are there any group projects or assignments that can be done together. We are for example currently exploring adding tags to assignments to indicate you could pair a programming assignment or that you could pair with AI.
[1]: https://sd42.nl/
by timostrating - First of all congrats on the launch.
I worked at an edtech startup with adaptive learning platforms in previous decades. One thing that is always difficult to surmount was that at the under K12 level were:
1. B2b it was hard to land large contracts(like getting an entire public school district to jump from large publishers like HMH or Wiley) because it turned out that the teachers themselves did not care about adaptivity when they had a thousand other things to worry about. But teachers are not the ones that make the deals. It's the school district board and The reps at large publishing just said we are also adaptive and no one would care about how you differentiated. Teachers and students really aren't the lot you have to convince in a b2b deal do you :)?
2. If you want the b2c route then the customer acquisition cost was way too high because again like to get teachers and students to actually adopt this to help them was really a hard sell, especially when the public school system has teachers that are so overburdened with other stuff.
I see that you mentioned charter schools for your pilot, which are not exactly public schools but I dunno of they come with the same set of challenges, but I wonder are these above two challenges are Also something you have had to face while scaling your product?
by ghm2199 - Congrats on the launch! I'm curious if you're familiar with ED Hirsch's work and if so how you see a "core knowledge" curriculum fitting into AI-enabled tutoring. Your landing page suggests you might be falling into traditional anti-patterns for strengthening reading skills like "finding the main idea" and "close reading" of the text (your ai tutor animation instructs a student to look closely for the answer). These patterns are commonly used in American education and have largely been discredited. They persist due to outdated learning theory taught in American educational schools and are likely responsible for our falling reading scores. I'm bringing this up because my hope is that any ed tech tool regardless of whether it uses AI would start with the right foundational theory.by rhaynes
- Article Title: Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/01/22/ed-tech-i...
- So, professional educator here, with fifteen years of high school teaching experience. If the sample passages and questions on the front page accurately reflect what's inside this, I would not let my kids go anywhere near it.
You've chosen to use the most generic AI-generated prose, when you could have licensed or hired writers to craft thoughtful, rich passages. I doubt you've consulted any serious standardized test item writers in the construction of what is essentially a standardized test item-based curriculum. This is the pedagogical equivalent of a Lunchable--mass produced, wrapped in plastic, and basically nutrition-free.
- I am here to tell you HELL YES and TAKE MY MONEY. I am such a fan of the idea of using AI to help give personalized and structured AI lessons in the hands of students and let them cook!
- It looks like you are gating family access to K-3 for now and I think that's right. I wouldn't really be comfortable giving my first-grader a live chatbot. Maybe I would think about whether there are other non-persona modalities that could still be self-directed (i.e. I am uncomfortable with a chatbot interface on this for a six year old but gamified flash cards with options could be different).
- I think the other issue is with motivation. I have various duct-tape versions of these types of agents and the thing about it is if you're doing the learning right it can be HARD. So I would think about using motivational interviewing or other techniques to help keep the user coming back and motivated.
- I would really think about the assessments here too. Many people are worried about LLMs ruining student evaluations, but if you could bake in reliable, flexible exams that gauge user progress (even for something like a "Did you read this" quiz) I would bet teachers would like it. There is likely so much you could do on student progress observability and e.g. structuring team-based projects or having targeted student working groups to hash out hard concepts in a targeted way, etc.
This is such an interesting market and use case too because the educational system might be very structurally set up to the current pedagogical staffing model (think about the incentives for teacher's unions and administrators). If you think it will be hard to change that system as quickly as you want I would also try to have an offering direct to families / home-schoolers. I think there is also a cottage industry of tutors that might benefit. Maybe partnering with the textbook publishers? I'm sure there are some "Teach your kids better" influencers that would get you into some feeds?