We're currently living through extraordinary times and I feel like I'm witnessing incredible things in both my personal life and the world around me. In my personal life, I'm blessed to be father to two young girls who I get to guide as I watch them discover the world for the very first time. In the world around me, I'm watching AI, a new and fantastic technology, change the entire way we do things. From software engineering and medicine to small business, new applications of AI are opening people's eyes to unique possibilities. MindFeast is born out of this new reality.
Today, I'm launching MindFeast with two AI-leavened products that were designed to bring enriching and educational experiences into our homes: MindFeast: Lock Screen, where AI optionally assists in generating beautiful curated slides for your children, and Charlotte, a full open-source AI homeschooling agent. I've been using both of these products in my home and am happy to have the opportunity to share them with you.
MindFeast: Lock Screen
The Lock Screen was born out of the frustration I felt from watching my oldest daughter continuously reach for her tablet to do things of little to zero value. Of course, I wanted her to be reaching for books, but the thought occurred to me, "Why can't she be reaching for something of value?" The British educator Charlotte Mason said, "[W]e are limited to three educational instruments — the atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit, and the presentation of living ideas." This idea of "education as atmosphere" is very compelling to me. For Charlotte Mason, education wasn't simply something you taught, it was something you lived. It was all around you in life and the world, but it was also something you cultivated in your home with living books, things of beauty, and great ideas.
[W]e are limited to three educational instruments — the atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit, and the presentation of living ideas.
— Charlotte Mason
This idea of "education as an atmosphere" is very compelling to me. For Charlotte Mason, education wasn't simply something you taught, it was something you lived. It was all around you in life and in the world, but it was also something you cultivated in your home with living books, things of beauty, and great ideas.
The main idea behind MindFeast is that I wanted to put beautiful and engaging content that I control, in front of my daughters. I wanted to cultivate the "atmosphere of living ideas" in my home, and on their devices. This could be simple photographs, music, great works of art, questions with multiple choice or plain text answers, essay questions, or a daily gratitude practice that logs to a gratitude journal. I built MindFeast to support all of these content types and plan to support more.
It's a small way to add an atmosphere of living ideas to your child's daily routine.
Since MindFeast is a lock screen, slides are triggered every time the tablet wakes up and it has an admin for parents where you can set how many slides are needed for an unlock. This ensures that every time your child reaches for the tablet, he or she has to interact with something you put there first. It's a small way to add an atmosphere of living ideas to your child's daily routine.
The slides are created by you, the parent. They can be created manually where you supply an image or song, and text, or automatically by an AI-powered slide creator for people who bring their own Gemini API key. This makes it easy to say something like, "Create a slide about symbiosis for a 3rd grade science class, where the correct answer is mutualism". You can give direction on the image you want, e.g. "show a bee and flower" or not (let the AI choose). It's up to you. As a parent, you still have total control. You can regenerate any image that's created and edit all of the text. You also have control over the aesthetic used to create images, so you can use a visual style that matches your family's predilection.
In our family, we find that requiring 3 slides to unlock is good for us and we like to keep a balance of informational slides and questions that relate to what our oldest daughter is currently studying. The idea isn't to make it difficult for her to get into the tablet, rather, it's to put something of value in front of her every time she uses it.
Charlotte
Charlotte is an opensource AI homeschooling agent, free for anyone to use. I built her because administrative homeschool tasks compete with both deep work and actual teaching. In a home with children and work responsibilities, it can be a challenge to strike the right balance between work and chaos. I wanted a way of streamlining the administrative tasks that go along with homeschooling: time logging, book logging, materials creation, lesson planning, field trip planning, etc. Automating much of that, has helped me gain some time back. As a busy parent, I'll take the win.
Though Charlotte ships with a default Charlotte Mason pedagogy, I made this configurable so she can be used for any style of learning a family might use: Waldorf, Montessori, [insert your custom pedagogy here]. Different families have different ways of approaching homeschooling, so it made sense to create her with this flexibility in mind.
Working together
The real magic happens when Charlotte and MindFeast work together. Though both products are fine to use alone, they can be used together, and it's extraordinary. MindFeast ships with a remote website that runs on your local network. This allows you to access the MindFeast running on your child's computer, from your laptop or phone. From the remote you can:
- Trigger a slide
- Change the number of slides required to unlock
- Choose the next slide you want triggered (and trigger it, if you so choose)
- Sync slides from your computer to the tablet
All this is done alone with MindFeast, however, since MindFeast supports those endpoints, Charlotte, running on your home network, can do all of those things too. Charlotte understands how to make MindFeast slides as well. So, Charlotte can make slides, push them to the tablet, change the number of slides required to unlock, and trigger slides. Since Charlotte can be configured to handle your time logging, and access your curriculum, she can make slides relevant to what your child is currently studying. If you tell Charlotte to make 3-4 slides for lesson 34 of language arts and lesson 28 of math, she'll read those lessons and make relevant slides based on the content of the lessons. If you tell her to push the slides to the tablet, she will.
In our house, Charlotte runs a Friday end-of-week pass. She loads the time logging sheet, looks at the lessons that were covered, reads the lesson plans, and makes relevant slides. Then she pushes them to the tablet. This ensures that my daughter is always getting new and relevant content related to what she's currently doing. This workflow feels like magic and works amazingly well for our family.
In Summary
AI will keep reshaping work and school. Home education, less bound by institutional bureaucracy, can put those tools to use unusually quickly and homeschooling parents are set to reap the benefits. What I care about is narrower than the headline version of that story: I want to put beautiful and thoughtful content that I curate in front of my daughters to create an "atmosphere of living ideas" that surrounds them. Charlotte and MindFeast are my way of doing this. If you try either product, or if you're building something similar for your own family, I'd love to hear how it goes.