kentlangley / Jane

# Jane
**Jane** is a friendly, adaptive learning app for kids, designed around ages ~8-12 (upper elementary) and named after its tutor character.
The learner's name, target age and grade are settings.
It runs as a single Cloudflare Worker with static assets and Workers KV, or as a standalone Node server (or Docker
container) with file-based storage, and it is built on the open
Marble Skill Taxonomy: 1,590 micro-topics across 8 subjects,
linked by 3,221 prerequisite edges.
> **v0.5.0.** It's a child's learning app, so all personal data is excluded from the repo, and every path has a clear
> license (see LICENSING.md). What's next: Roadmap. Changes: CHANGELOG.md.
## Philosophy
When I (Kent) thought about creating this with Landon, my thought was: here is an incredible taxonomy of knowledge as a
knowledge graph (powah!), AND pretty much any LLM these days of any power knows all the stuff in the taxonomy cold, so
let's lean on that. **Note that this system is NOT live AI. That is on purpose.**
- **The knowledge graph is the backbone.** The Marble Skill Taxonomy
 (1,590 topics, 3,221 prerequisites) decides *what* to learn, *in what order*, and *what mastery looks like*.
 Placement, inference, spaced review and the island map all come from it.
- **An LLM is an author, offline.** It writes things ahead of time: the kid-friendly questions, the glossary entries,
 and each night's quest. Everything it writes is checked (`build.mjs` and `publish-lessons.mjs` validate it) before it
 is published.
- **The app your kid uses has no live AI.** There's no chatbot, no text generated while the kid plays, and nothing is
 sent to a model during play. Jane's lines, the questions and the hints are all fixed content or simple procedural
 generators.
Why on purpose:
- **Predictable and safe for a kid.** Jane can only say what's already been written and checked. There are no surprises
 and no off-topic chats.
- **Reviewable.** Every question and quest is a plain file you can read before (or after) it's shown.
- **Private.** The kid's answers stay in your own storage, and no model sees them while they play.
- **Cheap.** No per-question API calls. It runs on a free-tier Worker.
- **Light to run.** It needs no AI service and no API key: `npm start` on any computer with Node 22, a Docker
 container, or a free-tier Cloudflare Worker. It keeps working if the nightly author skips a night.
- **Transparent for parents.** You can see exactly what gets shown, in the packs and on the parent report.
## Why "Jane"?
The tutor is named after Jane, the AI who first appears in *Speaker for the Dead*, the second book of Orson Scott Card's
*Ender's Game* series. In the books, Jane is a companion and teacher to Ender, and that inspired the name of this
friendly tutor. The name is just a nod to the books: this project has no affiliation with Orson Scott Card or his publishers.
## Features
- **Adaptive placement over the 1,590-topic graph.** Diagnostic questions walk the prerequisite graph to f