Apps your kid can actually use.
Privacy you can actually verify. Designed for face-to-face play.
Spark & Anvil is restructuring as a 501(c)(3) non-profit. All apps remain free forever. Read the mission →
What we don't do
- 🚫
No ads
Zero advertising, ever. No banner ads, no rewarded video, no sponsored content.
- 💸
No in-app purchases
The apps are free — there's nothing to buy. Your kid can't accidentally purchase anything. No power-ups, no premium currency, no upgrade nags.
- 👁️
No tracking
No analytics SDKs tracking your kid. We use Plausible (privacy-first, no cookies) on our website only — never inside the apps.
- 🔗
No third-party SDKs
The apps don't embed Facebook, Google, AppsFlyer, or any other tracking framework. Just Apple's own frameworks plus our open-source ForgeKit library.
- ☁️
No data leaves the device
All your kid's progress, settings, and AI-generated content stays on their device. Nothing uploads to our servers (we don't even have user-facing servers). The 2026 COPPA rules now regulate biometrics, voiceprints, and location — we collect none of it, so unlike apps that gather data and then ask permission, we have nothing to disclose in the first place.
Does it actually work?
Fair question — every app claims to teach. Here's the honest answer: our approach is grounded in decades of learning research and a method already proven in the market.
The method is research-grounded, not a hunch.
A 2020 review of two decades of educational games (Naul & Liu) found four narrative features that predict whether a learning app actually teaches. Our apps are built to land all four.
It is already proven in the market.
Story Time Chess teaches chess through a recurring cast using the same framework — and won Toy of the Year, a TIME Best Invention, and a Webby. We apply that method across the whole library, not one game.
It matches how kids actually think.
Bruner showed kids build understanding through story, not just rules. Greenspan's DIR/Floortime adds that abstract ideas stick when they arrive with a feeling — which is why each character feels something while they teach.
We're early — we don't yet publish our own outcome study, and we won't cite a number we haven't measured. What we can show is the research and the working method. When we do report results, it will be an honest signal: whether a skill learned in one app actually transfers to a related one — measured from anonymous, on-device, no-identifier aggregates, never a per-child profile. See the full research behind our approach →
How we handle data
Spark & Anvil apps are on-device first. Your kid's progress, settings, AI-generated content, and any creations they make stay on their iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
We use Apple's SwiftData framework for local storage, FoundationModels for on-device AI generation (no cloud calls), and SwiftUI for the interface. We don't operate any user-facing servers — there is literally no backend collecting your kid's data.
For our company website (this site), we use Plausible — a privacy-first, cookie-free analytics tool. It tells us roughly how many people visited each page. It does not track individuals, store cookies, or sell data.
Read the full privacy policy for details. The parent-friendly summary is at the top; the comprehensive legal version follows.
AI you can trust — by design
Most kids' AI in 2026 is a cloud chatbot your child talks to. Ours is the opposite, on purpose: it runs on the device, it can't chat, and it can't give away the answer.
On-device, not the cloud
The AI mentor runs on your kid's device with Apple's FoundationModels. Questions, answers, and anything your kid types never leave the iPad — there's no chatbot server to leak, log, or train on your kid.
A student to teach — not a friend to confide in
Our in-app AI is not a companion your kid chats with. It's a novice character your kid teaches: the kid explains the idea and catches the character's mistakes. There's no open-ended "talk to the bot" surface — nothing for a child to form an unhealthy attachment to.
It can't hand over the answer
The mentor is built to ask, never to answer — Socratic by construction. It surfaces your kid's own thinking and offers a gentle faded hint, but it structurally cannot type the solution, and it takes structured choices only — no free-text chat.
Compliant before the rules required it
In 2026 the field is scrambling: the GUARD Act advanced in the Senate, Character.AI banned minors after lawsuits, and the FTC's COPPA amendments took effect. Our design already clears that bar — on-device, non-companion, no free-text, no data collection — because we built it that way from the start, not because a regulator made us.
The in-app mentor is our Teachable Cast: your kid is the teacher, a cast character is the eager novice. It's the same Socratic design across every app. See how the method works →
A letter to parents
Hi — I'm Nathan, the person who started Spark & Anvil. I want to write to you directly, parent to parent, about what we're trying to do here and why it might matter for your kid.
I started building these apps because I wanted, for my own kid, the kind of educational software I couldn't find on the App Store in 2025. Software that wasn't an ad farm. Software that didn't lock the good stuff behind a $14.99/month subscription. Software that wasn't shipping every tap of your kid's finger off to someone else's analytics dashboard. Software that didn't try to be everything to everyone — but instead picked one specific thing your kid could learn and built a careful, joyful path through it.
Today there are 195 of those apps, across math and reading and science and music and art and emotional regulation and chess and ciphers and a hundred other things. Every one of them is free, ad-free, with no in-app purchases. Every one of them runs entirely on your kid's device — no servers, no telemetry, no third-party SDKs. The AI mentor inside each app is Apple's on-device FoundationModels — your kid's questions never leave the iPad. We're a 501(c)(3) non-profit (pending), and we plan to keep it that way. Forever isn't a marketing word; it's a structural commitment baked into how the organization is built.
Three things shape how we design every app. I want to name them so you can decide whether they match what you want for your family.
One — the cast IS the curriculum. Every app has a small group of named characters who recur across the lessons. Sir Pinwell IS the chess pin. Direct-Proof Dora IS direct proof. Stride IS the linear function. Your kid isn't watching a mascot dance around a math worksheet — they're meeting a character whose recurring behavior literally is the pattern they're learning. We call this distributed-narrative methodology, and it's grounded in 40 years of research on how kids build mental models through story.
Two — these apps are designed for face-to-face play. A growing number of them have a "pass-the-device" mode. You and your kid sit on the couch, hand the iPad back and forth, take turns, laugh, argue, restart the round. The device collapses into a shared object instead of a wall between you. The research on family-cohesion play is clear: kids learn faster, and feel safer, when an adult is co-present in the play moment. Browse the apps that ship pass-and-play modes — and ask us about the ones that don't yet.
Three — we take heavy content seriously. Some of our apps touch topics that aren't easy: history's harder chapters, climate change, online safety, loss, identity. For those, we follow SAMHSA's Trauma-Informed Care framework: every difficult unit ships with a content warning, an always-visible "skip" affordance, an audio-only mode, and a gentle co-noticing register that names what's hard instead of pretending it isn't. Where the content needs an outside voice we don't have, we bring in external sensitivity reviewers. We never use scare tactics on a kid.
About screen time — I want to be honest with you. I don't think screen time is a moral failing. I think it's a fact of life in 2026, and I think the question that actually matters is what's on the screen and who's next to your kid when they're using it. Our apps are designed to be put down. They have natural stopping points. They don't use streak-mechanics or notification spam to drag your kid back. And when you can, sit next to your kid for ten minutes and play together. Co-play multiplies what your kid learns and changes what the screen means in your household.
We're a small organization. I'm the founder; we're recruiting a founding board through 2026; we're applying for foundation grants and building individual donations. We don't have a big team or a marketing budget. What we have is the portfolio, the methodology, and a refusal to compromise on the things that matter: no ads, no tracking, free forever, designed for your kid and your family — not for a metric.
If you want to support what we're doing, the most valuable thing you can do is play the apps with your kid and tell us what you think. The second most valuable is to become a monthly donor — even $5/month helps. The third is to share us with another family who'd care.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for caring about what your kid uses.
— Nathan Tran
Founder · Board Chair
nathan@sparkanvil.org
Frequently asked questions
- Are the apps free?
- Yes — all our apps are free forever. No subscriptions, no in-app purchases, no recurring fees, no ads. Download as many as you want; they cost nothing.
- Then how does Spark & Anvil make money?
- We're a 501(c)(3) non-profit (pending). We're funded by foundation grants and individual donations — never by ads, in-app purchases, or child-data monetization. Our 2027 teacher network (live small-group classes inside our apps) is a teacher-led service where teachers keep 100% of class fees — Spark & Anvil takes 0%; Stripe charges ~3% direct, same as any payment processor. Every app. Every multiplayer feature. Free forever. No subscriptions. No in-app purchases. No ads. No tracking. We never monetize children directly.
- What ages are these for?
- Ages 5–18, all free. Our 195-app portfolio spans four age bands — ages 3–5 (Pre-K/K), ages 6–8 (early elementary), ages 9–14 (the tween core, the bulk of the catalog), and ages 15–18 (older-teen). Younger-band apps use audio-first, low-text activities; the tween core carries the full curriculum + illustrated cast; the older-teen band uses a mature, realistic register. Each app has a mascot or cast continuity so kids can graduate from one band to the next as they grow. The exact age band is listed on each app's page.
- Do you use AI? Should I be worried?
- Yes, we use Apple's on-device FoundationModels for things like AI mentors, hint generation, and adaptive feedback. All AI runs on the device — nothing your kid types or generates is sent to a server. There's no cloud-based AI processing personal data.
- What about COPPA?
- We comply with the 2026 FTC COPPA amendments (effective April 22, 2026). We don't collect personal information from kids under 13. We don't share data for advertising (we don't share data at all). We provide verifiable parental consent flows for any features that require it. Read the full policy.
Monthly parent digest
New books, new characters, seasonal collections, and short notes about what kids in our reading community are loving this month. One email per month. Unsubscribe anytime. Adult addresses only — we never collect emails from kids.