Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

Right. I remember in high school, when I learned about Anki, being amazed by it. I remember thinking, well, we could replace most of the time I'm spending here, so inefficiently, with a few minutes of Anki per day. Wouldn't that be nice!

Took me a while to realize, well, learning isn't exactly the main point of school. If it were, they might invest a little more effort into making sure people actually remember what they learn! (Ebbinghaus isn't exactly cutting edge stuff.)

So I remember thinking, rather cynically, well what we're doing here could be replaced with an app! (For context this was in the 2000s.) Not that I thought education should be just an app, obviously, but rather, my complaint was that what I was getting was strictly inferior to one.

I had hoped that the advent of AI would open up fully personalized learning tracks, but instead what we seem to have gotten is technology being used to surveil children all day (a bit of an unpleasant thing to train them for, no?), and to ensure they are conforming even more tightly to someone else's ideas about how they ought to be spending their time.

To clarify, I think that someone else telling me what I'm supposed to be interested in[0] (with threat of punishment no less) is deeply offensive to the basic fact of being an organism, but how inefficiently it's being done is a second insult on top of the first one.

That being said, I welcome innovation in this space.

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[0] I later discovered Education On The Dalton Plan in my school library, being apparently the first person in the school's existence to borrow it. The main idea of the book being that if the child directs his/her own learning, they're liable to actually learn something.

My school was a Dalton school, at least ostensibly, but most of the ideas in the book were illegal in my country. (And new laws passed while I was there squeezed it even further!) Turns out what I was after had been tried, over a century ago, but the government decided it was simply too offensive that the average person should be allowed to decide how they're going to spend their time -- at such an early age, no less!

- 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?