Frequently Asked Questions

An anti-addictive educational app is designed to help children learn without using manipulative techniques that maximize screen time. Unlike most apps that use points, streaks, leaderboards, and notifications to keep users hooked, anti-addictive apps like Lumi respect children's wellbeing by setting daily limits, avoiding rewards systems, and encouraging breaks.

Lumi is a free, open-source educational app for children that deliberately avoids addictive mechanics. It has no points, coins, streaks, leaderboards, or push notifications. Instead, it uses daily adventure limits and encourages outdoor play when the limit is reached. Lumi focuses on learning effectiveness rather than engagement metrics.

Yes, Lumi is completely free with no hidden costs. There are no ads, no in-app purchases, no premium subscriptions, and no data collection to monetize. Lumi is open-source software released under the MIT license, meaning the code is publicly available and can be inspected by anyone.

Lumi is designed for children ages 4-7. The app features adaptive difficulty that automatically adjusts to your child's skill level, making it appropriate for beginners just learning to count as well as children working on addition and subtraction.

Yes, Lumi works completely offline. All data is stored locally on your device using browser storage. No internet connection is required after the initial page load, and no data is ever sent to any server.

Lumi teaches math, grammar, and logic. Math topics include counting, addition, subtraction, and comparison. Each topic uses adaptive difficulty to match your child's current skill level.

Parents can set a daily adventure limit in the Parent Zone (default is 3 adventures per day). Each adventure consists of 5 problems. When the daily limit is reached, Lumi displays a friendly message encouraging the child to play outside or read a book instead of continuing with more screen time.

Absolutely. Lumi collects zero data. All progress and settings are stored only on your device's local storage. There are no user accounts, no analytics, no tracking, and nothing is ever transmitted to any server. Your child's learning data stays completely private.

Lumi currently supports English, Portuguese (Brazilian), German, French, and Spanish. The app automatically detects your browser language but you can manually select a different language using the language picker.

Yes, Lumi supports text-to-speech. You can enable auto-play voice in the Parent Zone settings, or tap the speaker button on each problem to hear it read aloud. Voice settings can be customized to use different voices available on your device.

Leaderboards create unhealthy social comparison and competition, which can cause anxiety and reduce intrinsic motivation to learn. Research shows that comparing children to their peers can be harmful to their self-esteem and relationship with learning. Lumi focuses on individual progress instead.

While many educational apps use gamification techniques like streaks, points, and rewards to maximize engagement, Lumi takes the opposite approach. Lumi is designed around the principles of humane technology, intentionally avoiding addictive mechanics. The goal is effective learning with healthy screen time habits, not maximizing time spent in the app.

Yes, Lumi is fully open source under the MIT license. The complete source code is available on GitHub at github.com/matheusml/lumi. Anyone can inspect the code, report issues, suggest improvements, or create their own version.

Lumi tracks your child's performance on each type of problem. After 3 correct answers in a row, the difficulty increases. After 2 incorrect answers, the difficulty decreases. This ensures problems are always appropriately challenging without being frustrating.