Everything you need, in one place

Open Kubo is an AI learning companion for every kind of mind — gifted, neurodivergent, struggling, and everyone in between. It's built for a parent at home or a teacher with a classroom.

Kubo doesn't replace you. It's a tool that sits between the learner and the curriculum, adapting explanations to how that specific child thinks. You stay in the loop through a dashboard that shows exactly what your child talked about, where they got stuck, and where they lit up.

This section is the short version of everything that matters. Skim it before the first session, keep it open during the session, and revisit it after to interpret what you saw.

Before the session (5 minutes)

• Confirm you're signed in on the device your child will use. Tap /play — their name should appear. If it doesn't, you're on the wrong account.
• Decide on a time box. 15–20 minutes for kids under 12; 25–30 minutes for teens. Set a timer. Kubo doesn't enforce this — you do.
• Pick a low-stakes subject for the first session (anything they're curious about, not a weak subject). Goal: they have a good first impression, not that they master fractions.
• Have paper and a pen nearby. You'll write 4 things down.

During the session — the 4 things to watch for

Don't help them unless they ask. Don't correct Kubo out loud. Observe. Mark what you see on paper (or in your notes app) in four columns:

Intervene if (and only if)…

• Kubo says something factually wrong about health, safety, identity, or family. Pause the session, tell your child Kubo made a mistake, and report it to us.
• Your child becomes visibly upset — tears, anger, withdrawal. Pause. Talk to them about what happened. Resume only if they want to.
• They ask you a direct question — answer it honestly, don't redirect them back to Kubo. The tool supplements you, it doesn't replace you.

Do NOT intervene for…

• Wrong answers from the child. Kubo is designed to treat these as hypotheses. Let the loop play out.
• Silences. Thinking takes time. Give them 30 seconds before assuming they're stuck.
• Kubo asking "what's your plan?" or "try a smaller number first." Those are scaffolds, not brick walls.
• Kids typing instead of speaking, or speaking instead of typing. Either is fine.

After the session (10 minutes)

1. Open the parent dashboard. Go to /parent → Sessions. Find the one that just finished. Read the last message from your child and Kubo's last reply. Check the signal snapshot: wins / stuck / skip-asks / bored counts.
2. Ask your child three questions. Not an interrogation — a conversation.
   • "What was the hardest part?"
   • "What worked — how did you figure it out?"
   • "What do you want to try next time?"
   These are the Estonia SRL reflection prompts. They build metacognition automatically, even if you do nothing else.
3. Write one sentence in your notes: "[Name] did [X], got stuck on [Y], lit up when [Z]." One sentence is enough. Over 5 sessions, patterns emerge.

Red flags across multiple sessions

If you see any of these over 3+ sessions, the tool isn't the problem — it's a signal worth acting on:

• Skip-asks climb every session. They're using Kubo as an answer machine. Have a conversation about effort vs. shortcuts.
• Bored signal stays high. Topics aren't right for them. Try the library's other subjects or let them pick free-form topics.
• Stuck signal never improves. Kubo isn't adapting well. Check their age/interests/special-needs profile in Settings — maybe needs updating.
• They avoid opening Kubo. Don't force it. Ask what would make it more fun. Kids telling you why something isn't working is more valuable than kids quietly enduring it.

Green flags

• They open Kubo without being asked.
• They use the word "we" about Kubo ("we figured it out", "Kubo and I…").
• They retry after wrong answers without visible frustration.
• They ask you a question you can't answer and go back to Kubo to figure it out.
• They remember what Kubo said across sessions.

1. Go to openkubo.com/api/auth/form.
2. Choose Sign up. Enter your name, email, and a password.
3. You're now the account owner — even if you're a teacher. Every learner you add is tied to your account and only visible to you. Other users never see your kids or sessions.

After signing in, go to /start. The onboarding asks 6 questions. Each one actually does something:

Name & age

Kubo uses the name directly ("Hey Derek!"). Age sets reading level, message length, attention span, and tone calibration.

Interests

Threaded into every explanation. If your child loves Roblox, ratios show up as Robux trades. Dinosaurs? Word problems feature T-rex. This is where personalization becomes real.

Learning style

Visual (pictures, diagrams), Logical (step-by-step), or Discovery (independent exploration). Shapes Kubo's default explanation style.

Special needs

Autism, ADHD, gifted — any or all. Each adds an accommodations block: autism triggers literal language and numbered steps; ADHD triggers short bursts and frequent wins; gifted opens Socratic questioning and above-level content.

Archetype

8 options (Explorer, Builder, Dreamer, Challenger, Steady, Support, Focused, Discover). Affects pacing and emotional tone — Challengers get peer-level respect; Steady gets small-win celebration; Dreamers get story-framed lessons.

Companion name

Default is "Kubo." Rename to whatever your child wants — Luna, Max, Potato. Whatever makes it theirs.

Children don't log in separately. After you've signed in on a device, share openkubo.com/play with your kid — they see all the learners in your account and tap their own name.

1. Tap your name. A welcome portal shows their level, XP, and streak.
2. Today's Focus surfaces first. Any imported assignments or planner items scheduled for today sit at the top of the welcome screen. Tap one to jump straight into that lesson.
3. Plan your week. Below Today's Focus, a collapsible panel lets the kid drop topics onto days, accept or decline parent suggestions, and see what they committed to (section 6).
4. Arrive in chat. Kubo usually opens with a planning prompt like "What's your plan today?"
5. Chat naturally. Kids type like texting a friend. Tap the mic to speak instead. Kubo's replies can auto-read aloud — the animated Kubo character's mouth moves in sync with the audio.
6. Full Classroom (optional). Any chat can become a structured slide-and-quiz lesson.

Kubo's teaching engine is guided by methods from Singapore MOE, OECD PISA, Shanghai, and Estonia. In practice:

• Planning before solving. Kubo opens most sessions with a planning question — high performers (per PISA 2026) spend more time planning before executing.
• Concrete → Pictorial → Abstract (CPA). If abstract explanations aren't landing, Kubo shifts toward visual models (bar diagrams) or concrete examples (smaller numbers, real-world objects).
• Guided, not given. Kubo offers scaffolds — hints, bar models, simpler versions — instead of dumping the answer.
• Mistakes as data. A wrong answer is a hypothesis to refine, not a failure to shame.
• Reflection. End-of-session reflection (Estonia SRL) helps kids name what was hard, what worked, what to try next.

Teachers email assignments, hand out worksheets, or post to Google Classroom. Open Kubo lets you paste any of that into a form, and Kubo turns it into a lesson your kid can actually do with scaffolding — not just read and guess at.

How to import

Go to /parent → Assignments → “Add assignment”. Paste the teacher's instructions verbatim, drop in any attached PDFs or images (up to 3 files, 5MB each), pick a subject and due date, save.

Approval before the kid sees it

Every import lands in Pending your approval. Your kid does not see it until you tap Approve. This is deliberate — teacher emails sometimes contain other kids' names, feedback on grades, or reply-all chains you don't want filtered through an AI tutor.

What happens when the kid starts it

Kubo reads the assignment aloud, then offers three paths: “teach me the topic first / let's work on it together / I have a question about it.” PDFs are text-extracted and fed into the lesson so Kubo knows the actual questions, not just the title. Images are linked for the kid to open but not parsed (yet).

When the kid marks it done

It moves to your Kid says done queue. You read what they did, then Accept or “Needs work…” with a short note. If you send it back, Kubo references your note next time the kid starts that assignment (“Your parent wanted you to take another look at X”).

Assignments are reactive — whatever the teacher sends. The planner is proactive — your kid picks a handful of topics for the week and drops each one on a day. Kids feel ownership when they chose Tuesday is space day; handed-to-them schedules feel like more homework.

Where it lives

On the kid's /learn welcome screen, under Today's Focus. Collapsible panel labeled 📅 Plan your week. Three sections inside: suggestions from you, their 7-day week, and an “add your own topic” form.

Kid adds a topic

Types a title (“how volcanoes work”), optional subject, picks a day, hits Add. Shows up on that day. Tapping it later launches a conversational session with Kubo — lighter than an imported assignment since there's no teacher text or grading.

Today's Focus pulls it forward

On the scheduled day, the planned topic jumps into Today's Focus alongside any imported assignments. No chance the kid forgets what they committed to.

Every assignment card on your dashboard has a small 🧭 Parent primersection. It's a 30-second cheat sheet, generated automatically the first time you look at the card:

• Key concepts — one or two plain-language sentences on what the topic is actually about.
• Where kids get stuck — two to four specific pitfalls for this kind of work at your kid's age.
• Questions you can ask — two to four open-ended prompts that check whether your kid understands vs. just copied an answer.

The point isn't to turn you into a tutor. It's to give you enough to guide without pretending. Most parents haven't thought about common denominators or iambic pentameter in twenty years. Five minutes of primer beats nodding along and feeling lost.

You can regenerate a primer anytime (the Regenerate button in the card). If the generator is down, the rest of the flow still works — the card just shows a retry hint.

Kubo's outputs pass through two safety layers before they reach the kid:

Sentence-level gate on streaming replies

As Kubo speaks, each completed sentence is scanned for blocked content before any of it reaches the screen or speaker. If a sentence fails the check, the stream halts mid-reply and Kubo politely rephrases. The kid never sees or hears the offending sentence.

LLM moderator on fallback (non-streaming) replies

When a reply takes the non-streaming path (rare — only when the main streaming path fails), a second AI pass reviews the whole message before it's sent. This catches subtler things the regex filter misses (e.g. an attempt to manipulate the kid into keeping secrets from you).

Age-aware rules

Younger kids (under 8) get stricter filtering — words like “war” or “die” are blocked even in educational context. This is the current default; we're tuning because it's currently a bit over-eager on biology and history lessons.

Adult contexts are exempt

The filter is only applied to kid-facing chat. When you (the parent) chat with Kubo on /guide or /start, the filter is skipped so you can ask practical questions without the AI being squeamish.

Go to /parent. Sidebar lists every learner on your account — pick one.

Dashboard view

Top stat cards: Sessions this week, Time learning, Turns exchanged, and a Signal Snapshot (section 10). Below: recent sessions with inline badges.

Learning view

Subject-by-subject mastery bars, backed by Kubo's curriculum node system.

Flags view

Red/yellow/green flags for prerequisite gaps, misconceptions, or areas needing review.

Sessions view

Full history. Click any session to expand and see the last user message, Kubo's last reply, and per-session signal counts.

Assignments view

Your approval and review queues. Every imported assignment and every suggestion you've sent shows up here with its parent primer. See sections 5 and 6 for the full flow.

Upload view

Drop a photo of the chalkboard, a PDF syllabus, or a CSV of topics. Kubo aligns future lessons.

Settings view

Swap the AI provider, paste your own API key, tune preferences per learner.

Kubo watches what kids type and flags specific patterns. These aren't judgments — just counts of words and phrases. How to read them:

How to read them together. A healthy session = mostly wins with a few stuck moments. Many stuck + many skip-asks = Kubo isn't adapting well for this child; check the transcript. Lots of bored = wrong topic, wrong time, or the novelty is wearing off.

Kids usually lead. Three ways to steer:

1. Let the kid choose. Best for curiosity-driven learning.
2. Seed it before. "Today let's work on decimals" — Kubo follows what they type.
3. Upload the syllabus. Parent dashboard → Upload. Drop a photo, PDF, or CSV; Kubo aligns future lessons.

Current curriculum covers math (fractions, decimals, geometry, multiplication, algebra, patterns, Singapore CPA, 13 problem-solving heuristics), reading (phonics, fluency, comprehension), metacognition (OECD PISA), writing fundamentals, and basic science (earth, life).

Open Kubo supports one account with many learners:

1. Sign up once as yourself.
2. Add each student via /start.
3. Students appear in your sidebar on /parent and on /play. Switch between them by tapping names.
4. Each student has isolated memory, profile, and session history. Notes about Student A never leak into Student B's chat.

Open Kubo is local-first by default:

• Every chat runs on the Open Kubo sovereign infrastructure (or your own self-hosted node). No cloud AI is called unless you explicitly choose one.
• If you want cloud AI for speed, you add your own API key in Settings. Your key, your quota, your choice.
• Data that lives on the server: student profiles, session logs, users database.
• We don't sell data. We don't train on your child's chats. The codebase is open source — audit or self-host.

For cloud-speed responses, add your own API key:

1. Go to /parent → Settings.
2. Choose a provider from the dropdown.
3. Paste your API key.
4. Save. That learner's future chats use your key instead of the default.

Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite is the cheapest option — typical family usage is a few dollars a month. Set a monthly spend cap in Google Cloud for hard safety.

If your provider fails or rate-limits, Kubo silently falls back to the local Open Kubo model. Your kid never sees an error.

"Oops — my brain got fuzzy for a second."

Server hiccup. Ask again. If it repeats, check Settings → AI Provider.

Kid can't see their name on /play

Not signed in on that device. Sign in at /api/auth/form, then hand the device to your kid.

Session not showing on the dashboard

Refresh. Sessions save 1–2 seconds after the exchange completes.

Chat feels slow

The default model is sovereign — first token ~2s. For sub-second, add your own cloud API key in Settings.

Sign-in link logs me in as the wrong person

Fully sign out (top nav), then sign back in. Multiple accounts on one browser can collide.

I see another parent's student in my list

Bug — report immediately. Each account is tenant-isolated by design. Send the student name you shouldn't have seen; we'll investigate.

How do I delete a learner?

Not in the UI yet. If self-hosting: delete the student folder in student-memory/ and remove the ID from children in data/users.json.