Grizzly Study Buddy
A kid-first study buddy: type, paste, or photograph your study material and it becomes games—math facts, spelling, reading, and more.
The spark
I watched my daughters studying timed math facts with paper flash cards, the same way I did 35 years ago. I first built a tiny app called MathWiz so they could practice anywhere without the dread of timed drills. That prototype grew into Grizzly Study Buddy—an expanded, friendlier companion for practicing core skills together. The latest rebuild is organized around one idea: bring your study material, and the app turns it into games.
What it is
- Study Sets: type, paste, or photograph a study list—spelling words, math facts, vocab—and the app turns it into playable games.
- Nine math mini-games plus flashcard modes, including Streak (survive until your first miss) and Blitz (a 60-second sprint).
- Reading practice with grade-leveled passages and comprehension quizzes.
- A friendly mascot that guides kids through challenges and celebrates progress—confetti included.
- No accounts and no setup: a kid can load it and be playing in under a minute.
- A space where my girls can "co-design" new ideas and games as we iterate together.
Stack
- React and TypeScript (strict) with Vite, tested with Vitest and Playwright.
- Claude Code as pair programmer, with GitHub Actions enforcing lint, typecheck, tests, and build on every PR.
- Vercel for hosting and serverless functions, behind a Cloudflare-managed domain.
- Gemini for photo OCR and reading-passage generation—rate-capped, budgeted, and with a non-AI fallback at every surface.
What I learned
- Sitting next to real users—my daughters—while the CI/CD pipeline runs is incredibly powerful. They hit a friction point, I push a change, and they're testing the fix minutes later.
- Kid-first means zero friction: auth and billing are parked, not because they're hard, but because requiring an account would break the promise that you can just start playing.
- Making every shuffle and game board seeded and deterministic pays off twice: sessions are replayable for kids and testable for me.
- AI features should degrade gracefully: OCR and passage generation run against budgets with caps, and every AI surface has a non-AI fallback.