What Synapse is, the two products that share its engine, and an honest account of where it actually stands today.
Status of this document: Internal knowledge base, extracted and organised from development, design, governance, and safety-review conversations. Not marketing material. Written to support an AI agent answering questions from principals, teachers, parents, trustees, and reviewers accurately — including about what is not yet resolved.
What Synapse Is
Synapse is an AI-powered learning support platform for New Zealand primary school-aged children (NZ Curriculum, Years 1–8). It pairs an AI tutor persona, Aria, with a set of teacher- and parent-facing tools for progress tracking, communication, and — where enabled — social-confidence practice and AI literacy education.
Synapse is built and operated by a single developer, Stu Pearson, based in Dunedin, New Zealand, trading informally as "four30" (no company is currently registered — see Governance Model).
Two Separate Products, One Shared Engine
Synapse is properly understood as two commercially independent products that share the same underlying tutor, curriculum grounding, and security architecture. See Synapse Public Knowledge Architecture v0.1 for the full breakdown — that document is the authoritative reconciliation of the split described here, and should be read alongside this overview whenever a question touches both products.
Family Synapse (Product A) — a direct-to-parent subscription. A parent creates an account, sets up per-child pseudonym profiles, and their child uses Aria directly. This is the original, self-serve version of the product, and is the current public-communication priority (see below).
School Synapse (Product B) — a teacher creates a classroom, students authenticate with a PIN, and the teacher has additional tools (class progress overview, messaging, curriculum steering, worksheet generation). This is the version used in the school pilot (see Pilot Programme).
Family and school are not billed together, and a school-provisioned child's access is free of any family subscription — see Synapse Public Knowledge Architecture v0.1 §6 for the exact rule and its current limits (notably, a parent of a school-only child does not get the Family Synapse parent-facing tools unless they separately set up a family account).
Current Public-Communication Priority: Family First
As of Aug 2026, public-facing communication should lead with Family Synapse, not schools, boards, or teachers. This is a deliberate near-term decision, not an oversight: the school pilot's own future is genuinely undecided (it may not proceed at all — see Pilot Programme and Governance Model), while Family Synapse is available now and is the nearer-term path to revenue. School-facing material should remain accurate and available, but should not be the emphasis until the pilot's trajectory is clearer. See Synapse Public Knowledge Architecture v0.1 §9 for the full reasoning.
Core Value Proposition
The founding conviction is that adaptive, patient, one-on-one tutoring — the kind no single teacher can give simultaneously to every child in a class — has value precisely because it supplements rather than replaces the teacher. Aria is designed to keep the teacher informed and central, not to operate independently of them.
What's Confirmed vs. What's Proposed
This repository distinguishes:
Live / built — implemented, tested, and (unless stated otherwise) currently deployed
Designed but not built — specified in detail but not yet implemented
Proposed / future — an idea discussed, not committed
Each feature document states its status explicitly rather than assuming.
Current Real-World Status (as of Aug 2026)
Feature-complete for a supervised pilot.
A pilot conversation is underway with one New Zealand primary school. It has been suspended and reinstated once already over governance concerns. [The school and its principal are named in the source document, but not on this public page — they are a third party who did not agree to appear on it.]
Three family accounts exist, but "in active use" would overstate it. Corrected against the live database (11 Aug 2026): the three accounts were created across July 2026 and cover four children between them. The most recent recorded activity by any family was 3 Aug 2026 — a single family, on a single day. The other two have had no recorded activity since 11 July and 19 July respectively. No family has used the product in the eight days to 11 Aug. The accurate description is "three family accounts, lightly used, currently dormant" — not three families in active use.
The developer has been explicit, in writing to the school, that important governance and accountability questions are not yet resolved — see Governance Model and Risks and Known Limitations. This repository preserves that honesty rather than smoothing it over.
Related Documents in This Repository
Synapse Public Knowledge Architecture v0.1 — read this first for any question touching both Family and School Synapse: the product split, shared vs. product-only components, the home-access/no-double-billing rule, and the family-first communication priority
Future Direction — Community Synapse — conceptual future third deployment model for educational contexts outside both family and school; not implemented, does not change the family-first priority