Notes from inside Lumi.
Founding story, learning science, product decisions, and the honest tradeoffs of building an AI tutor for kids. Written by Tim de Vallée for parents who want proof before they hand their child a screen.
A parent's framework for evaluating any AI tutor
Five questions that separate a real Artificial Intelligence tutor from a chatbot in a cartoon wrapper — score Lumikids, score everyone else.
Adaptive learning isn't a setting — it's the whole product
Most apps adjust a difficulty slider. A real tutor rewrites the next moment based on what your child just said.
How my four-year-old taught me to build an AI tutor
Remi waited fourteen seconds for an app to answer him. I watched his curiosity die in real time, and then I started writing code.
From reading to math, science, and languages: the Lumikids roadmap
Why we started with the hardest subject, what's next, and the two things we've decided we will never build.
Screen time is the wrong question. Screen quality is the right one.
Twenty minutes of a patient tutor and twenty minutes of autoplay video are not the same input, and pretending otherwise has cost a generation of kids.
The parent dashboard: what we show you and why
Observability for your child's learning, not a feel-good weekly summary.
Voice-first learning: why we built around speech, not taps
Tapping a screen is not how a four-year-old learns a language — so we stopped pretending it was.
What developmental science says about attention in early learners
Attention spans grow on a known curve. Most kids' apps are designed against it.
What 'safe AI for kids' actually means (and what it doesn't)
A plain-English look at the guardrails that matter — and the five questions every AI tutor company should be willing to answer.
Why a ten-second delay kills your child's learning
A four-year-old's working memory runs out faster than most apps load a response.
Why we built Lumi
A reading tutor that moves at the speed of your child.
The science behind Lumi's pacing
How a tutor adjusts when a child is bored, lost, or somewhere in between.