Creating a living atmosphere of education in the home is something I strive to do. It's not enough to simply teach our children. We have to create an environment where education becomes part of the fabric around us. This can be giving our children the space and tools they need for learning how to think, enabling their creativity, promoting questioning, and creating moments of reinforcement. Above all, an atmosphere of education should be beautiful, empowering, and fun for our children. As part of my continued goal to support this in my home, I've developed a simple product: an alarm clock. Before you laugh, hear me out.

Instead of waking to dad's annoying alarm buzz, my daughters wake to the great composers and painters from history.

Introducing the MindFeast Agent Alarm. The idea is simple: As we continue to study great composers and artists from the past, our homeschool agent who logs the work we do, can push music and images to my daughters' wake screen. Instead of waking to dad's annoying alarm buzz, my daughters wake to the great composers and painters from history. My homeschool agent automatically rotates songs and images based on what we're doing at any given time. This keeps the agent alarm in lockstep with our learning.

This is done through endpoints that any agent or application can interact with over our home network. An agent can:

  • Check whether the alarm is set, what time it’s for, and what music, picture, notes, and theme are currently loaded
  • Set the wake time
  • Turn the alarm on or off
  • Choose which days it repeats (or make it a one-time alarm)
  • Push a new wake song
  • Add the song’s title and composer
  • Push a new picture background image
  • Add the picture’s title and artist
  • Restore the default morning picture
  • Read the morning note and its heading
  • Write or update the morning note
  • Change only the note’s heading
  • Read the current colors and look
  • Change the colors and look
  • Restore the default look

One of the nice things about all of this is that in addition to pushing a song and image, my agent can push a note. This can be anything: an inspirational message, more information about the song or image, a reminder, an interesting detail from or studies from the week, something that needs practice, anything.

I would be remiss if I did not mention, AI is totally optional as well. Though the Agent Alarm was designed with agentic workflows in mind, all of it's functionality is accessible right in the app. Pictures and music can be uploaded, notes, added, the color scheme theme changed. The Agent Alarm doesn't have to be used with AI.

To conclude, the MindFeast Agent Alarm, is a small thing, a detail. It's a simple way for us to create an atmosphere of education in our home. It fits well with what we're doing in our homeschool and it works well for us. I hope you like it!