Different-Drums: A Case Study

The product

An AI tutor and homeschooling platform that adapts to every child.

Different-Drums gives each child a patient, personalised AI tutor tuned to their age and learning level, alongside the tools a parent needs to run real home education: worksheet and test generation, week-by-week curriculum planning, progress tracking, and full visibility of everything their child does.

Content is personalised to each family's preferences and stays age-appropriate throughout, with parents in control of how their child learns and how far they explore.

What's inside

A full learning platform, for children and their parents.

›AI Tutor

Patient, personalised conversations tuned to each child's age and learning level, with every message saved for the parent to review.

›Worksheets & Tests

Generated to a child's exact level and printable, drawing on hand-authored, human-verified question banks rather than raw AI output.

›Curriculum Builder

AI-assisted learning paths, week by week, with checkpoints that advance as the child demonstrates understanding.

›Home-Ed Planner

Terms, weeks, days, routines and one-tap catch-up rescheduling. Offline-first, for real family life.

›Parent Dashboard

One hub for the whole family: per-child profiles, learning history, and full transparency into every conversation and worksheet.

›Usage & Safety Controls

Daily limits, monitoring and approval workflows, so parents decide exactly how and how much their child uses the app.

›Learning History

Daily per-subject summaries and progress tracking, so a parent can see exactly what was learned and where curiosity wandered.

›Spaced Repetition

A memory game that resurfaces past concepts on an evidence-based schedule to lock in retention.

Under the hood

Built like production software, because it is.

The visible app is the small part. Underneath sits the engineering that keeps a children's product safe, affordable and compliant.

SafetyMulti-layer content filtering: input pre-filtering, keyword monitoring, automatic flagging and a moderation workflow, plus a vision safety screen for images.
PrivacyGDPR / COPPA / FERPA aligned: child data segregation, audit logging of every third-party call, one-tap data export and deletion.
SecurityNo secrets in the client: every AI and payment call is routed through server-side cloud functions; API keys never touch the device.
CostEngineered to run cheap: tight context windows, aggressive caching, local classification and hand-built banks that avoid paying a model to generate what's already correct.
AccessAccessibility throughout: font scaling, five themes, high-contrast and dyslexia-friendly modes, text-to-speech and voice input.
ReachOne codebase, three platforms: full parity across iOS, Android and web, with an offline mode that syncs when reconnected.

Anyone can build a chat screen. The work was the tens of thousands of verified questions, the cross-platform delivery, and the safety and compliance underneath.

A note on the source code

The code is private, on purpose.

Why you're seeing a case study, not a repository.

Different-Drums is a live commercial product with real families using it. Its source is kept private for the same reason any shipping product's is: it holds subscription logic, safety and moderation rules, and a large body of original, hand-authored educational content that took a year to build.

Keeping it closed is a deliberate, professional choice, not a gap. The best way to judge the work is to use the app itself, and I'm always happy to walk a serious client or collaborator through the architecture and codebase directly.

A complete AI tutoring platform for children, built and shipped solo.