Last Week with Hypandra: Building for the Room

A big focus of this week was engaging with people about our Curiosity Builds — getting them in front of family, teachers, and collaborators and seeing what happens when someone who isn't us tries to use them.

Saw The Ball

Several things converged to push Saw The Ball forward this week. I watched my brother-in-law chatting with his daughter before her soccer game, and it brought me back to how my nephew and I came up with the game in the first place, building on advice about baseball my dad used to share with us.

Then someone told me the handoff story was compelling. One of my sisters sent encouragement. When multiple people respond to the reason something exists, you want the thing itself to match.

So we pushed it: 89 database-backed scenarios replacing the old hardcoded ones, search, filters, bookmarks, playlists, player sprites, and a realistic field background.

SpellBetterNow

SpellBetterNow also had multiple converging influences this week. My wife caught the initial issue — definitions that accidentally revealed the target word's spelling. We rewrote them. Then my brother-in-law spent real time with it and had lots of feedback: not enough words, leveling jumps too steep, and more. Talking to a homeschooling mom about her spelling program pushed me to add a larger library of spelling patterns, and we ran the AI principles audit on it.

Separately, I wanted to be able to use SBN more passively — without requiring audio. We built a spelling app that depends on hearing words spoken aloud, but that's not always how I want to practice. Sitting with that led to a whole parallel mode: IPA phonetic transcriptions, text hints for 859 words, spelling pattern explanations, error-aware tips that notice how you misspell a word.

Bringing it all together: more words, more transparent patterns, and a bunch of bug fixes from real use.

Curiosity Builds

We ran two one-hour builds with people this week: Rippled Echoes, an interactive journey through historical personas with a globe view, and KW Algebra, riddles and puzzles to play with algebra. We also ran our first live build with a teacher. On Friday, we ran a 2hr Curiosity Builds! session and built CuriousFractions.com from our open-source template. The session followed our plan: we introduce Hypandra, talk about Curiosity Builds! with examples and our own learning journey, then brainstorm together, plan, build, and refine. Two hours later: a fun and fully functional fraction estimation game with AI coaching, progressive hints, and a teacher dashboard with per-teacher prompt customization — shipped and live.

In a fast-follow after the session, we added a curiosity badge, ran an AI principles audit, applied a C?X review to remove blame language, and added a changelog.

The brainstorming matters. The client doesn't walk in with a spec — they walk in with something they're curious about, and we figure out together what a tool for that might look like.

WildReader

WildReader is under significant rebuilding. We're adding a Studio Canvas and Studio Prep following Reggio principles — the goal is that you can use the Studio Prep mixer to create your own games. That work is actively in process.

The new games we created that are live right now in the main play area: Imagine & Read, Matching Lines, and Tell Me With Riddles. The last two were created at Wilder's request — he wanted a juice box matching game and a riddle game, so we built them.

We've run our AI principles audit on WildReader itself, and it's informed new changes that we'll be writing about as well. We're trying to make WildReader an example not only of how we can build for curiosity, but how we can build tools that let other people — particularly children with their parents — explore how to be curious with AI while cultivating their own critical thinking, question craft, and autonomy.

Building in Public

Trevan published six Curiosity Builds! episodes this week and built out ConundrumDesk.com — inspired by the Slate Political Gabfest. He documented the whole arc: the pivot, storing anonymous data, tightening the UX, iterating on submissions. By one episode he was coding from an airplane. You can find all the episodes on our videos page.

Meanwhile, we built a video transcript indexing system so those episodes show up in Hypandra's search.

What's Next?

Be curious. There's a lot of tension right now about where AI is going, what it's going to do to our jobs and our lives. The viral posts seem to mostly distract and disrupt — we're working on more stuff to engage with that more directly and more constructively. We're still thinking about it, and we'll have more to share soon.