Synapse
An AI tutor for New Zealand primary schools and families.
Synapse gives every child what no classroom can: a patient, curious learning companion available whenever they are — at their level, at their pace, following their interests, and aligned to the New Zealand curriculum.
What Synapse is
Synapse doesn't teach — teachers and parents do that. Its tutor, Aria, works alongside the adults: guiding a child's thinking rather than handing over answers, connecting what a child loves to what they need to learn, and flagging to the teacher or caregiver when a human should step in.
One rule runs through the whole app: Synapse drafts, suggests, and flags; the adult decides.
Children can type to Aria or simply talk with her — she speaks and listens — which suits younger children and any child for whom typing is a barrier. And part of what Synapse teaches, openly, is what AI itself is: how it works, what it's good at, where it goes wrong, and how to stay in the driver's seat. Aria is a tool, not a friend — and Synapse says so out loud.
For schools
The school version is free. Teachers see each child's progress in summary, record their own PAT results (Aria never generates or alters formal assessments), generate individualised worksheets for a whole class in about thirty seconds, and steer how closely Aria follows the curriculum for each child. Children who can't be at school carry on at home — same account, same tutor — and stay in touch with their teacher through the app.
We are beginning classroom piloting now, deliberately carefully: staged starts and open questions worked through with schools rather than decided for them. There is no sign-up form for schools — a school account holds other people's children, so we set them up by hand after talking it through. If your school is interested, get in touch: projectsynapsekids@protonmail.com
For families
The family version is the same tutor, with a caregiver in place of a classroom. The school version is not a funnel: nothing in a child's school profile is ever used to market anything to their family.
Privacy, plainly
The only identifying details Synapse holds in readable form are a child's pseudonym, an adult's email address, and basic class information. Everything else — conversations, interests, the AI's picture of each child — is encrypted. Family content is stored encrypted under a key derived from the parent's password, so it can't be read from our database or backups, and the app has no admin or support route into it. Two honest limits: a child's typed messages are sent in readable form to our AI provider to generate replies, and as the developer we have server and source access and are not technically prevented from changing how the service works in future. Read the full Privacy Policy. Aria has no access to the internet — she cannot look anything up, and when a child asks about something beyond her knowledge, the adult is asked instead. Her only tool is a calculator.
We'd rather describe our privacy honestly, limits included, than hide behind the word "secure" — schools and families are welcome to ask us anything about how it works.
Who's behind it
Synapse is built independently in Dunedin, New Zealand, by its developer — a one-person project with a simple motivation: on his daughter's first day of school, she came home saying the thing she'd learned was how to wait. Synapse exists so that no child has to.
Questions, schools, and curious parents: projectsynapsekids@protonmail.com