FundaAI - An offline AI School for self-driven learners across Africa

I’m building an AI School, FundaAI, giving self driven kids across Africa supplementary education to build critical thinking skills, help them excel academically and future proof their careers guided by AI Tutors. In practical terms, kids get access to laptops connected to a “virtual campus” of offline AI tutors.

One on one tutoring is the most effective way to significantly increase learning outcomes.

MarcAndreessen

what will the future of elite education look like?
For most of history, elite education meant 1:1 tutoring— Aristotle taight Alexander the Great. socrates tutores the youth of Athens.
It worked then. Research showsit still works now.
Marc and Ben explore why this model is starting to look viable again- and whst it could mean for the future of education.
#A16z #Future #Elite #Education #History #Aristotle #Alexanderthegreat #Athens

The Future of Elite Education: A Return to 1:1 Tutoring

https://www.tiktok.com/@a16zandreessen/video/7491810715938950446?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc

It makes sense why, the delivery of what is being taught is more tailored to the student. FundaAI gives kids tailored education guided by offline AI. One monthly fee gives you access to all of these tutors, right from the laptop. They are always on and they learn from the kid’s performance.

A virtual campus of AI Tutors

The laptops are connected to a virtual campus of AI Tutors.

The "virtual campus" is the heart of FundaAI, it's not just a collection of AI tutors but a complete learning ecosystem that lives on the laptop. Think of it as a digital school where each AI tutor has its own specialized "classroom" (desktop app) but shares a common foundation (the offline AI brain).

When a student opens their laptop, they enter this campus where different tutors are available for different needs:

• The Examiner helps with test preparation and academic assessment

• Other tutors could include subject specialists, research guides, writing coaches, etc.

What makes this campus special is that it's designed to function offline first, you don’t need to have a persistent internet connection. The AI brain acts as the central intelligence that all tutors draw from, but each app provides a specialized interface tailored to specific educational needs.

The campus tracks learning progress across all tutors, building a comprehensive profile of the student's strengths, weaknesses, and learning patterns. Creating a personalized experience that adapts over time.

Updates to the campus happen whenever the laptop connects to the internet – new tutors can be added and existing ones improved based on aggregated student performance data.

The AI tutors/desktop apps all interface with the offline “AI brain”, each tutors specializes in something. For example, one AI Tutor; The Examiner - helps kids prepare for exams through guiding them through past exam papers. The video shows the beginning of this, “virtual campus”, a centralized campus of AI Tutors and a library designed for 21st Century Education.

While The Examiner focuses on academic performance, the virtual campus will grow to develop broader critical thinking skills that school systems often overlook. Think of it like teaching a kid not just to follow recipes (exams) but to become a chef who understands ingredients and creates new dishes (innovative thinking). Future AI Tutors will guide students through practical problem-solving, teaching them to break down complex challenges, evaluate evidence, and develop reasoned arguments - the kinds of skills employers desperately need.

One tutor might focus on project-based learning, where students design solutions to real-world problems in their communities. Another could teach computational thinking, helping students understand how to approach problems like a programmer without necessarily writing code. These tutors work together like different coaches developing different muscles. This isn't just about passing tests; it's about preparing African youth to create their own opportunities.

Let’s get a little more technical

The MVP

I am running a pilot by building this out for my first user; my nephew. If you think about what I have described, a few things become obvious;

• This is offline first - therefore I am building desktop apps to act as AI Tutors. The rationale is that this isn’t just about chatting with AI, it’s about using AI to generate some valuable output. For example, The Examiner;

  • generates and renders past paper questions. Instead of using AI for this, I opted to build an AI Agent using Dagger (this needs it’s own blog to explain the workflow) extracting individual questions and answers from close to 2000 past papers and answer sheets from the Cambridge International Curriculum. I wanted more deterministic output so I opted not to use AI to generate questions/answers.

  • the users are able to answer the questions. The questions and answers are then sent to a local AI model for a “preliminary report”. Each time the user answers a question, this is queued up in a cache and whenever the laptop is online, this output is sent to a commercial AI model for the “full student report”. This is acknowledging the limitations of an 1.5B model (what is running locally when the laptop is offline) and using this to generate the initial report of how the student performed (it receives; the user’s answer, the correct answer and the question) and then using larger models to generate more detailed output (ie. what are some areas of improvement, what should you be studying to build a better understanding of the questions you struggled with etc.)

• I need to start off with just one app; The Examiner to focus on the lowest hanging fruit with a more clearly communicable metric; ie. Helping kids improve their grades. This is the easiest selling point

• The first version I have will not be the final version, therefore I need to have a way to send updates to iterate on this AI Tutor and build other tutors to build out the school. In order to do this I created an “AppStore” or more appropriately; a “Virtual Campus”. This is a store of all the desktop apps with a centralized system to track what each user has downloaded, what they use and reports from their academic performance, tracked by a unique identifier associated with their laptop.

I look at this as the “Virtual Campus” of an AI School, foundational to testing the validity of my assumptions.

What are the next steps

As next steps I need to finish off building The Examiner, more specifically the logic to default to the offline AI model when the user is offline and sync to online models whenever the laptop is connected. This also involves ensuring the output produced by AI is conceivably valuable.

After this, the laptop will be shipped to my nephew, using this pilot to get feedback to iteratively improve The Examiner and build other AI Tutors to improve this grades and learn foundations for practical technical and critical thinking skills.