Problem-forward, Global South angle Why No Homeschooling App Worked for My Zambian Children — So I Built One With AI
Category: Practitioner Case Studies | Reading time: 6 min
Why Stories Are the Most Powerful Technology We Have
Before I became a researcher, I was a student in Zambia watching my teachers tell stories.
Not to fill time. To transfer something that a textbook could not carry. The best teachers I had did not start with the lesson. They started with a person. A moment. Something real that had weight and smell and consequence. And then the lesson lived inside that story forever. I could not forget it because the story would not let me.
That is not an accident. That is design.
Cognitive science has a name for it. Narrative transportation. When a person is genuinely inside a story — not reading about it but living it momentarily — their brain processes it differently than it processes information. It encodes it more deeply. It connects it to emotion. It makes it retrievable years later in ways that bullet points and frameworks simply do not.
Every learning system I have ever studied, every database I have ever built, every AI framework I have ever designed — the ones that actually worked started with a story. A specific human being in a specific situation with a specific problem that needed solving. Not a use case. A person.
The Teacher Who Got Too Close
I spent seven years as an ICT and Guidance Teacher in Zambia's Ministry of General Education.
And yes — sometimes that got me in trouble.
Why are you bringing your students this close? People would ask. Colleagues. Administrators. The system itself, in its quiet bureaucratic way, reminding me that there was a correct distance between a teacher and a learner. A professional distance. A distance that protected the institution from liability and the teacher from entanglement and the student from the dangerous illusion that someone in a position of authority actually cared about them specifically.
I never managed that distance very well.
Every class I taught — it was beyond just being a class teacher. I was their friend. I wanted to see them. Not their grades. Not their attendance records. Not their performance against the national curriculum benchmarks. Them. Where they were going and whether they believed they could get there and what was sitting on their chest at 14 years old in a system that was not always designed to see them clearly.
I wanted to know what made them lean in and what made them shut down. I wanted to know which student needed to be challenged hard and which one needed to be believed in first before they could be challenged at all. I wanted to know the whole person — because I had figured out early that the whole person was the only unit of analysis that actually mattered in a classroom.
I guess I am doing the same thing for my kids.
And Before You Come For the Technical Argument
You can argue about schemas. You can argue about the relationships between data tables. You can argue about APIs and whether what I built is production-ready and whether Lovable is a real development tool or a shortcut and whether someone with my background has the right to call herself a builder.
I know those arguments. I have sat in rooms where they were made. I know database architecture. I know how tables connect and what breaks when the logic between them is wrong. I have built systems that handled federal compliance requirements and served thousands of people and passed audits that would have exposed any structural weakness in the data model. I know what a poorly designed schema costs you six months into a build. I know the difference between a system that runs and a system that holds.
I implemented this. Not theoretically. Not conceptually. Actually.
The tool gave me speed. The knowledge was already there — built over years of systems work, doctoral research, and seven years of watching what happens when a learning experience is designed around the real human being in the room versus the imagined average one.
So yes. You can argue about the technical specifications.
Just know that the person you are arguing with has already thought about them — and then went ahead and built it anyway for reasons that have nothing to do with impressing you.
The Letter
Wanipa. Koko.
This one is for you. Not for LinkedIn. Not for the algorithm. Not for the doctoral committee or the conference panel or the people who need to see credentials before they decide if I am worth listening to.
For you.
I have been away for almost four years.
I want you to know that I have counted every single one of those days. Not dramatically. Not in a way that made me unable to function — because I could not afford to be unable to function. But quietly. The way you count things that matter too much to say out loud.
9,893 miles. I looked it up the first time and then I could not stop looking it up. As if the number would change. As if checking it again would make it smaller.
It never got smaller.
I looked for something I could give you.
Not a present. Not a video call where we both pretend the connection is good enough when it is not. Something real. Something that said — I know you. I have been paying attention across every timezone and every missed bedtime and every photograph that arrived on my phone at 2 in the morning Reno time which was morning in Lusaka and you were already up and already becoming more of who you are without me in the room.
I know that Koko needs to move before she can sit still. I know that Wanipa needs to see the finish line before she will start running. I know the songs you like and the subjects that make you lean in and the exact moment when you have stopped learning and started performing patience for the adult in the room.
I know you.
No app knew you. I searched. I found apps built for children whose lives look nothing like yours. Children whose curriculum comes from somewhere else. Whose cultural references are not yours. Whose languages do not include the ones you move between like water.
Every platform was built for someone else's child.
And I am not interested in someone else's child. I am interested in you.
So I built something.
Saturday night. Your grandmother's voice somewhere in the background of my memory telling me that when you cannot find the door you build one. Ingrid Michaelson on repeat because her voice does something to the inside of my chest that makes hard things feel survivable.
Everybody wants to love. Everybody wants to be loved.
I built it the way I know how to build things — with the architecture first, the logic of how pieces connect, the decisions about what data matters and why and how it should flow. I used tools that closed the gap between knowing and building. And I put you inside every decision.
Koko — the app knows you need a break before you know you need one. It will not wait for you to check out. It will shift before that.
Wanipa — the app will show you exactly how far you have come. Every time. Because I know that is what keeps you going and I have been keeping that knowledge for years waiting for somewhere to put it.
I am not going to tell you it is perfect.
I am going to tell you it is yours.
Built by your mother, from the other side of the world, on a Saturday night, with a song on repeat, because the distance is real and the love is realer and technology gave me a way to put the second one inside the first one and hand it to you.
Every learning experience in that app is there because I know something specific and true about who you are. Not who I hope you will be. Not who the curriculum says you should be at your age. Who you actually are right now, today, in this specific season of your specific lives.
That is all instructional design ever was supposed to be.
I just needed you to exist for me to finally do it right.
I am coming home.
Until I do — open the app.
Your mother built it.
For Wanipa and Koko. Everything else is just work.
Priscillar McMillan is a doctoral research assistant in Information Technology in Education at the University of Nevada, Reno, former UNICEF consultant, and founder of Kowa Agency. She builds learning systems, advises organizations on ethical AI implementation, and writes weekly on the decisions that will shape how the world learns.