Help center
How Kizupi works, how to set it up, and exactly what happens with your child’s data. For parents, teachers, schools and districts.
Kizupi in one paragraph. Kizupi is a free math tutor for children in Grades 1 to 6. A pixel owl reads each problem aloud, listens to your child’s answer, asks “how do you know?”, and gives hints one small step at a time. A math engine decides what is right, a fixed set of teaching rules decides what happens next, and Kizupi speaks lines written by people. There are no ads, no trackers and no child accounts, and a parent can see, export and delete everything.
Getting started
What do I need?
A tablet (or a phone or computer) with a current web browser and an internet connection. Kizupi runs in the browser at kizupi.com/app; nothing to download from an app store. The child’s screens are made to be held sideways.
How do I create an account?
- Open kizupi.com/app and enter your email. We send a 6-digit code that works once, for 10 minutes. Entering it creates your free family account.
- There are no passwords. Next time you can sign in with another emailed code, or with a passkey (Face ID, Touch ID or your screen lock) if you add one.
- Before any child profile exists, you confirm you are the child’s parent or legal guardian and give consent. Accounts are for adults only.
Adding a child
- Give a first name or nickname (a nickname is plenty), their school grade, and a pixel animal they’ll tap to find their profile. A family can have up to 4 children.
- No birthday, photo, surname, school or location is asked for.
The placement game
The first time, a short puzzle game finds the right starting point. It isn’t a test and there’s no score. It looks at a few building blocks from the grade before and a handful of problems from the current grade, then suggests a start lesson and a track (Steady, Stretch or Summit) for you to approve. Any shaky building blocks become a short “Quick review” at the start of the next lessons.
Installing it on the home screen
Kizupi can be added to the home screen so it opens full-screen like an app. The app walks you through it during setup. On iPad: tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. On Android: open the browser menu and choose Install app or Add to Home screen. Updates install themselves; Kizupi never reloads in the middle of a lesson.
The in-app guide
Parents get a short illustrated Guide in the parent area, and children get a How to play practice run before their first lesson (they can replay it from the map).
Lessons, hints and homework
How does Kizupi teach?
Reasoning first, in the tradition of the Russian School of Mathematics: understanding before procedure, early algebra from Grade 1, word problems and pictures, and a steady “why?” until the idea is the child’s own. Each grade has a number unit, an algebra unit and a geometry-and-logic unit, and every unit ends with a star puzzle.
What happens in a lesson?
- Kizupi reads each problem aloud, with captions. Your child answers by holding the talk button and speaking, by tapping the keypad, or by typing, and can draw on a scratch canvas.
- After some answers, Kizupi asks “How did you get that?” so the child explains their thinking.
- Some problems have more than one right answer; Kizupi accepts any right one.
- Pictures help: bar and segment models, and figures to count shapes in.
- A lesson lasts about 15–25 minutes for younger children and up to 45 by Grade 6 (you choose). Kizupi wraps up at a natural stopping point.
How do hints work?
Kizupi never hands over the answer first. It waits, then climbs a ladder of up to seven small hints, only as far as your child needs: a pause, reading the problem again, focusing on the key part, drawing it, one step, a twin problem with easier numbers, and finally a walk-through. Kizupi also notices common mix-ups (for example, adding when a problem asks what was there at the start) and asks a question aimed at that mix-up.
Homework, pop quizzes and challenges
- Homework is short, spaced and mixed: it brings back earlier skills just before they fade. Your child shows their work, can retry, and Kizupi looks back at it in the next lesson. Homework that is due or overdue appears at the top of your Progress page and in your email.
- Pop quizzes are quick checks inside a lesson.
- A challenge ends each unit, with a star puzzle.
The map, worlds, notebook and badges
Progress shows as a path across one of eight worlds, each with its own animal buddy. My math notebook keeps pages your child wrote in their own words. Badges mark skills they have mastered and stay earned. By default children see stars and progress, never percentages or grades (you can change that in Settings).
Languages
English always works. You can turn on help in one of 15 other languages: Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Japanese, German, Polish and Italian. Problems stay in English on the card, while Kizupi reads, captions and helps in the chosen language, and your child can answer and explain in it. Your child can switch between English and that language on the lesson screen.
Settings and accessibility
Each child has their own settings in the parent area, grouped as Plan, Voice, Look, Privacy, Profile and Family.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Session length | How long a lesson runs. The choices depend on the grade. |
| Lessons per week | A gentle goal from 2 to 5. A missed day is never a problem. |
| Track | Steady, Stretch or Summit. Stretch and Summit add contest-level problems. Kizupi recommends changes; nothing moves without your approval. |
| Kizupi’s voice | Spoken instructions on or off (captions are always on), a choice of eight voices, and speech speed. |
| Word highlighting | Highlights each word as Kizupi says it, for emerging readers. |
| Dyslexia-friendly font | Wider letter shapes across the app. |
| Reduced motion | Turns off celebrations and Kizupi animations. |
| Left-handed layout | Moves the drawing tools and buttons to the left side. |
| Sound effects and world music | Each can be turned off separately. Music dips while Kizupi talks. |
| Jokes | A short, kid-friendly joke now and then at a break, never while your child is stuck. |
| Show scores | Off by default: stars and progress only. On: percentages after homework and tests. |
| Weekly email | A short Monday-morning note about the week, per child. |
| Language | Help in one of 15 languages besides English. |
| Nickname, “How to say it”, grade, world and animal | What Kizupi calls your child and how it pronounces it, their grade (changing it starts a short placement game) and their theme. |
Progress and reports
- The Progress page answers five questions, top to bottom: are they practicing enough, what they’re learning, how it’s going, are they working on their own or with help, and how you can help at home. Tap ? next to any heading for an explanation. You can switch weeks and print the page.
- The weekly email arrives at 7am on Monday in your time zone and covers the Monday-to-Sunday week that just ended. Weeks without practice send nothing.
- Practice time counts only active minutes, not a tablet left open.
- Co-parents: invite another grown-up in Settings → Family. They sign in with their own email, give their own consent, and see the same children and progress. The account owner can remove them at any time.
Tablets, child mode and the parent PIN
Handing the tablet to your child
Tap Hand to child. The tablet switches to child mode and shows “Who’s learning today?”; your child taps their picture and starts. Children never type an email or a password.
Getting back to the parent area
Tap the lock and enter your 4-digit parent PIN (set it in Settings → Family), or use your passkey. After five wrong tries the PIN locks for 15 minutes. The grown-up area closes by itself after 15 minutes, or as soon as the tablet goes back to your child’s screens. Forgot the PIN? Choose Sign in with email and change it in Settings.
Setting up a second tablet
On a device where you are signed in, open Settings → Pair a tablet. On the new tablet, open kizupi.com/app/pair and type the code shown. The code works once, for 10 minutes, and puts that tablet in child mode without signing in on it.
Lost or given-away tablet
In Settings → Family, remove it under Tablets in child mode, and sign out any browser you don’t recognise under Signed-in browsers.
Your account and your data
- Export: Settings → Family → Your data → Export data downloads everything Kizupi keeps about your family, as a JSON file.
- Delete a child: in that child’s Settings, under Profile, delete the profile and all of its learning history.
- Delete everything: Settings → Family → Your data → Delete everything (type DELETE to confirm). A co-parent can instead leave the family.
- Deleted data is removed from our database right away. Copies in backups and logs expire within 30 days.
- Sensitive actions like exporting, deleting, changing the PIN or pairing a tablet ask you to confirm it’s you again.
- Kizupi is free: no trial, no card, no ads and nothing to buy.
Privacy and children’s data (COPPA and FERPA)
Kizupi is built for children, so it is designed to follow the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) when a school uses it. The full detail is in the privacy policy; here is what matters most.
What we keep about a child
- A nickname, an optional sound-alike spelling, grade, track, chosen world and animal, and settings.
- The learning record: skills practised and mastered, lesson, homework, quiz and unit results, hints used, time spent, and notebook pages.
- That is all. No birthday, photo, real name, location, contacts or audio.
What we never do
- No advertising, no ad or analytics trackers, no third-party pixels.
- We never sell children’s or parents’ data, and never share it for marketing.
- We never use a child’s information to build an advertising profile or to train AI models.
- There is nowhere in the app for a child to post publicly or message other people.
Who we share it with
Only the service providers that run Kizupi: Cloudflare (hosting, database, file storage, email) and Google’s Gemini (Kizupi’s spoken voice, translation when a language is turned on, and speech-to-text only when a tablet can’t do it itself). They are limited by contract to providing their service to us. The privacy policy lists exactly what each receives.
Cookies
Only two first-party cookies that Kizupi needs to work: one keeps a parent signed in and one remembers a tablet set up for a child.
Voice and the microphone
- Push-to-talk only. The microphone is on only while your child holds down the talk button. There is no always-on listening and no wake word.
- Recognised on the device. Your child’s words are normally turned into text by the speech recognition built into the browser or tablet (run by the device maker, for example Apple or Google). Only the text of the answer reaches Kizupi.
- Fallback, never stored. Where the tablet can’t recognise speech itself (for example in an iPad Home Screen app), the short clip recorded while the button is held (at most about 15 seconds) passes through our server to Google’s Gemini speech-to-text, and is discarded once the text comes back. We never store audio of a child.
- Not used for training. We don’t use children’s voices or words to train AI models, and we ask our AI providers for zero data retention and no training on what we send.
- Personal details removed. Names, addresses, phone numbers and similar details a child says are removed before the words reach any AI service or our logs.
- No emotion guessing. Kizupi never infers feelings from a voice or face. A child can tap a face at a feelings check-in, and that’s all.
- Prefer no microphone? Your child can answer everything with the keypad or keyboard.
How Kizupi uses AI, and why the math is always right
Kizupi is not a chatbot. A deterministic math engine decides what is right. A fixed, rule-based teaching engine decides every move. Kizupi speaks lines written and reviewed by people. A language model is never asked whether an answer is correct and never invents the math.
Correctness comes from a math engine
Answers and steps are checked by a symbolic math engine using exact arithmetic (whole numbers, fractions and decimals are compared exactly, never rounded or guessed). It accepts equivalent forms, like “0.5”, “1/2” and “2/4” (unless a problem asks for a particular form, such as a fraction in lowest terms), and problems with more than one right answer.
Every move comes from teaching rules
When to wait, which hint to give, when to ask “How did you get that?”, when to review: all decided by a rule-based policy engine that behaves the same way every time for the same situation. It is tested automatically on every change.
Every problem is verified before release
Problems are built from templates by curriculum authors. Before any release, every template is generated hundreds of times and each version must have an engine-verified answer, correct solution steps, hints that don’t give the answer away, and no “wrong answer” pattern that could accidentally be right. A template that fails isn’t released.
Where AI services are used
- Kizupi’s voice: turning Kizupi’s own written lines into speech.
- Translation: when a parent turns on another language. A translated line must keep exactly the numbers and math symbols of the English one, or the English line is used instead, so a translation can’t change the math or reveal an answer.
- Speech-to-text fallback: only when the tablet can’t recognise speech itself (see Voice).
Guardrails on everything Kizupi says
Before any line is spoken it is checked automatically: it must not reveal the answer, must stay at the child’s reading level, and must praise effort and strategy rather than ability. If we ever let an AI model reword a line, it never receives the child’s name, never decides correctness, and its output goes through the same checks, with the human-written line as the fallback. There is no open-ended conversation: a child can’t steer Kizupi off topic.
Child safety
- Everything a child says or types is screened. If it suggests they may be unsafe, Kizupi replies with a reviewed message encouraging them to talk to a trusted grown-up and, where the situation calls for it, emails the account owner to check in. That email doesn’t repeat what was said.
- Kizupi never asks a child where they live, how old they are, or to keep a secret.
- Grown-up settings on a child’s tablet sit behind a PIN or passkey.
Security
- All traffic is encrypted in transit (HTTPS). Data is stored with Cloudflare, which encrypts it at rest.
- No passwords to steal: sign-in uses one-time email codes or passkeys. Codes and session identifiers are stored only as one-way hashes, and codes are single-use, expire in 10 minutes and allow 5 attempts.
- Sign-in is protected by bot checks and rate limits. Sessions expire after 30 days of inactivity, and you can see and sign out every signed-in browser.
- Families can only ever reach their own children’s data; every request is checked against the family it belongs to.
- If a breach ever affects your family, we will tell you promptly. To report a security issue, email hello@kizupi.com with “Security” in the subject.
Kizupi for schools and districts
Kizupi is free for every family and school, runs in the browser on the tablets and Chromebooks you already have, and keeps children’s data to the least a tutor can work with.
Student data in school use
- A contract comes first. Before any student data is shared with Kizupi, the district and Kizupi sign an agreement (such as your district’s or state’s data privacy agreement) that says exactly what data is used and how. Nothing is shared until the district authorizes it.
- On the school’s behalf. Student data is processed only under the school’s direction, as a “school official” under FERPA, and only to provide the tutoring. The school or district controls it, and we help it answer parents’ requests to see or correct their child’s records. We aim to comply with FERPA, COPPA, PPRA and state student-privacy laws.
- The least a tutor needs. From a roster we use only a student identifier (the roster’s own ID, so progress continues between sessions), a first name or nickname, grade, and the class and teacher they belong to. We don’t need birthdates, addresses, demographics, contact details, grades from other subjects or any other records, and a student doesn’t need an email address.
- Kept separate, kept short. Each district’s data is kept apart from every other district’s and from family accounts, used only for educational continuity, and deleted when the district asks or its agreement ends.
- The same promises as for families: no ads, no trackers, no selling, no marketing, no training AI on student data, and no audio stored.
Single sign-on and rostering (Clever)
We are building a Clever integration so that:
- students log in with one tap from the Clever Portal, and younger students with a Clever Badge (a QR code), with no password or PIN to type;
- class rosters sync automatically, so teachers never set up a class by hand;
- shared classroom devices are safe: a new Clever login always replaces the previous student’s session, there is a visible log-out button, and an idle tablet logs out by itself.
Until it launches, families set Kizupi up at home, and a tablet can be put in child mode with a one-time pairing code. To be told when it’s ready, or to pilot it with your school, write to us.
For IT and privacy reviewers
| Area | Kizupi |
|---|---|
| Cost, ads, in-app purchases | Free. No ads, nothing to buy. |
| Trackers and analytics | None. No third-party pixels or advertising cookies. |
| Sale or marketing use of data | Never. |
| AI training on student data | Never. |
| Answer checking | Deterministic symbolic math engine, not a language model. |
| Open-ended chat | None. Teaching moves come from rules; lines are human-written and output-checked. |
| Audio | Push-to-talk only; recognised on the device; never stored by Kizupi. |
| Student sign-in | No child passwords or emails. Clever SSO (Portal, Instant Login, Badges) and rostering in development. |
| Contracts | A signed data privacy agreement with the district before any student data is shared. |
| Subprocessors | Cloudflare (hosting, storage, email); Google Gemini (voice, translation, speech-to-text fallback). |
| Deletion | Immediate from the database; backups and logs within 30 days. |
| Encryption | In transit (HTTPS) and at rest. |
| Accessibility | Read-aloud with captions, word highlighting, dyslexia-friendly font, reduced motion, left-handed layout, 15 languages. |
Need a data privacy agreement, a security questionnaire or a pilot? Contact us.
Troubleshooting
I didn’t get the sign-in code
Check your spam or promotions folder for an email from hello@email.kizupi.com, then tap Send a new code. Each code works for 10 minutes.
“The security check didn’t go through”
Wait for the check box to finish, then try again, or reload the page. Some content blockers stop the check from loading.
Kizupi doesn’t hear my child
- Allow microphone access for the site when the browser asks (or in the browser’s site settings).
- Your child needs to hold the talk button down while speaking and let go when done.
- Answers can always be tapped on the keypad instead.
Kizupi is silent, or sounds different
Check the tablet isn’t muted and that Kizupi’s voice is on in Settings. If Kizupi’s voice service is slow to answer, the tablet reads that line with its own built-in voice, so it can sound different for a moment. Captions are always shown.
“Can’t reach Kizupi”
The tablet is offline. Kizupi keeps trying and picks up where your child left off once the connection is back.
The screen is sideways, or asks me to turn the tablet
The child’s screens are designed for a tablet held sideways. Turn it, or unlock screen rotation. Sign-in and the parent area work upright too.
I forgot my parent PIN
On the PIN screen, choose Sign in with email, then set a new PIN in Settings → Family.
Kizupi marked a right answer wrong (or a wrong one right)
Please tell us, with the grade and the problem. Every report is checked against the math engine and fixed.
Still need help?
Use the contact form or email hello@kizupi.com. A person on the Kizupi team reads every message and answers by email. See also the privacy policy, the terms of use and the changelog.