Questions, answered

A grown-up signs up with an email address and gets a seven-day free trial — no card needed. From your dashboard you then add your kids: each one picks a display name and a passphrase, no email address required for kids. Invite links from another family still work too, exactly as before.

There's no age check or restriction — and no upper limit either. A younger kid who can read confidently will need a grown-up sitting next to them at first; a confident reader will get going on their own; an older kid will sail through the early lessons faster but the later ones (story mode, functions-as-values) still bite. The voice and pacing aim for kids, not teens or adults, but plenty of grown-ups have enjoyed it too.

Seven days free with everything unlocked, no card. After that it's NZ$5/month for the whole family — every kid in the household shares one monthly AI allowance, with top-ups if a busy month runs it dry. If you stop paying, nothing is deleted: projects and lessons keep working, only the AI buddy rests. The full picture is on the pricing page.

Then they stop — there's no streak guilt, no notifications chasing them back. Their account just sits there. We'd rather have a kid who's excited the few times they open it than one who's nagged into daily use.

Real text-based code. Kids write Irene — a kid-friendly language that reads almost identically to Python. By lesson 7 they're writing functions; by lesson 21 they're juggling records, scenes and event handlers. The skills carry straight over to Python, JavaScript or any text-based language they meet next.

On a Chromebook, yes — anywhere Chrome or Firefox runs. On a tablet it'll display but the editor really wants a keyboard; an iPad with a keyboard case works fine, an iPad in your hands does not. The whole thing runs in the browser, no install.

A typical lesson is 10–25 minutes from first click to a playable result. There are nearly 40 lessons: a quick editor tour, a beginner arc, and then several tracks that open in parallel — bigger games, interactive stories, looks-and-sound, and an advanced power-ups track — so kids follow what excites them rather than one fixed line. Past that, they drop into free-play with the editor and the bundled game templates (snake, platformer, asteroids, flappy, a few more) and tend to lose afternoons.

Yes. Beyond the bundled artwork there's a built-in pixel Sprite Studio — your kid paints a character, animates it frame by frame (with onion-skinning to line up a walk cycle), and uses it in any game just by naming it, right alongside the supplied sprites. There's also a Generate button in the Studio: describe a sprite ("a tiny red dragon") and the AI draws a pixel version straight onto the canvas as a starting point to edit — descriptions are safety-checked first and generations are capped per day. Games can also play looping background music: one line picks from dozens of chiptune tunes, and it can switch on a scene change. None of it needs uploading files — the art and music live in their account.

Yes, inside the invite circle. Your kid presses Publish to snapshot the current game and gets a `/play/...` link to send to a friend. Friends in the circle can play it, leave a comment, or remix it into their own account; anyone outside the circle gets a 404. Sharing publicly isn't built and isn't planned.

People invited into your kid's circle — the friends a grown-up has vouched for, plus friends-of-friends. Strangers can't be in the circle by definition. There's no public discovery, no leaderboard, no DMs.

Yes — but only kids in the circle, and every comment is checked by an AI safety pass before it appears. Anything mean, off-topic, or unsafe gets held back. If the safety check is unavailable for a moment, the comment posts but is flagged for the admin to look at. Your child (and the admin) can hide any comment at any time.

No — and that's the central design choice. Ren is hint-first by default: she points at the line, asks what the kid would try, and only shares code (one or two lines, never a whole file) when explicitly asked. The kid steers Ren mid-conversation with what she says: "show me" gets the code, "walk me through it" breaks the goal into 3-5 steps that Ren guides one at a time, "just ask me" turns Ren fully Socratic (questions only, no code). There's no "just do it for me" button — that's not the product.

Ren sees your kid's current code and the chat history of the current project (truncated to the last 10 turns). Every exchange — the prompt, Ren's reply, token cost — is saved to a database row your admin can audit. There's a per-kid daily token cap (300,000 default; you can lower it or pause Ren entirely with one click), plus the family's shared monthly allowance.

Yes, with two passes. Ren's chat replies stream live and then go through a second safety check by a smaller Claude model (Haiku, with a kid-specific rubric — sexual content, real-world violence, slurs, leaking personal info). If that pass flags the reply, both bubbles are pulled back from the chat, your kid's message returns to the input box so they can reword and resend, and the flagged reply lands in the admin queue. Kid-to-kid comments on a shared game go through the same kind of check before another child sees them; failsoft (check unavailable) posts but flags for admin review. Haiku is judgement, not a guarantee — the admin queue is the human catch. See the How Ren actually works section on For grown-ups for the honest detail.

A display name, a username, and a passphrase — no email address. Their code, their AI chats with Ren, their lesson progress. That's it. No analytics tracker, no advertising, no third-party SDKs.

Your child, and the adult who invited them. Nobody else — no public profile, no discovery, no leaderboard. The adult who invited them can delete the account and everything in it from the family page, any time.