In Neal Stephenson's 1995 novel The Diamond Age, a device called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer changes the life of a street kid named Nell. It doesn't teach her by lecturing. It teaches her by telling stories that respond to her life, asking questions that force her to think, and never once dumbing things down. It meets her where she is and walks beside her as she figures things out.
Thirty years later, we have the technology to build it. So we are.
The Primer is an open-source Socratic AI learning companion for children aged 5 to 14. It runs today as a desktop application and text REPL in Rust, holds real conversations with children, and is designed from the ground up to eventually run on a battery-powered handheld device with no internet required.
It's AGPL-3.0 licensed. Every line of code is public. And we need contributors: especially for languages beyond English and German.
There is a fabulous manual for developers wanting to jump in: https://github.com/hherb/primer/blob/main/docs/devel/index.m...
In Neal Stephenson's 1995 novel The Diamond Age, a device called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer changes the life of a street kid named Nell. It doesn't teach her by lecturing. It teaches her by telling stories that respond to her life, asking questions that force her to think, and never once dumbing things down. It meets her where she is and walks beside her as she figures things out. Thirty years later, we have the technology to build it. So we are. The Primer is an open-source Socratic AI learning companion for children aged 5 to 14. It runs today as a desktop application and text REPL in Rust, holds real conversations with children, and is designed from the ground up to eventually run on a battery-powered handheld device with no internet required. It's AGPL-3.0 licensed. Every line of code is public. And we need contributors: especially for languages beyond English and German. There is a fabulous manual for developers wanting to jump in: https://github.com/hherb/primer/blob/main/docs/devel/index.m...