For Parents: Your child is growing up in a different world

We're building a school learning culture that rises to meet it with Mindjoy.

We're Mindjoy and if you're reading this it is likely that your child's school has chosen to partner with us to support their learning this year.

A way to think about us, is as a group of educators and technologists building AI-enabled learning infrastructure dedicated to teaching, learning and a whole new world assessment. We’re committed to growing talent and helping young people build the skills humanity needs to flourish with technology.

With Mindjoy, educators and learners leverage human creativity and the best AI technology for learning.

We wanted to introduce ourselves directly, because we think what's happening in the AI space right now matters for your child and most parents don't have the full picture.

We are living through a pivotal moment in education. AI is reshaping what work looks like, what skills matter, and what it means to learn. We're most concerned about young people sleepwalking through this shift: using AI as a shortcut rather than a scaffold, pressing a button instead of building a thought for themselves, outsourcing their thinking to a machine before they've ever learned to trust their own mind.

We believe this is not just a technology problem. It's a values conundrum. And it has serious consequences for the generation your teen belongs to.

The future will not reward the person who knew how to hack their homework with ChatGPT. It will reward the learner who can reason under pressure, learn from failure, adapt when the tools change and leverage many of the technologies and tools available to them. This change will change, faster than any of us expect. The single most valuable skill your teenager can develop right now is not a subject. It's the capacity to think independently, learn deliberately, grow through productive struggle and uncover domains and skills they are motivated to learn and master.

That is what we built Mindjoy to protect: a love of learning.

And now your school is part of community choosing to lead.

The AI problem no one is talking about

Your teenager almost certainly has access to tools like ChatGPT or Meta AI. These tools can write an essay, solve an equation, or summarise a chapter in seconds. That can be useful. But the research tells a more worrying story.

In one study of high school students, those using AI completed more practice exercises than their peers but, when tested without AI, scored 17% lower than students who never had access to it. The work got done. The learning didn’t.

Researchers describe this as the difference between productivity and mastery. AI can make students look capable without making them capable. Assignments get completed, marks may stay stable, but critical thinking quietly erodes.

Curiosity — the engine of real learning — starts to switch off.

When we “one‑shot” with AI, we remove the productive struggle of tackling a problem. The cognitive work that builds real understanding doesn’t happen. Every shortcut skips a layer of thinking that, once skipped, is hard to rebuild. Most AI tools weren’t built for learning; they were built to do things on behalf of humans. Used passively, they encourage outsourcing thinking instead of developing it.

By early 2025, roughly one in four teenagers was using ChatGPT for homework. AI homework help has gone mainstream — mostly without guardrails, teacher oversight, or any design intent around learning at all.

“Free” AI tools aren’t really free

When your teen uses a free AI chatbot, they aren’t the customer. They’re the product.

ChatGPT trains its models on user conversations by default unless you actively opt out in settings. A Stanford study found that most AI developers are not taking steps to remove children’s input from their data and highlighted a core issue: young people cannot legally consent to the use of their data.

Meta AI goes further. As of December 2025, Meta began using conversations from Meta AI — across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — to personalise advertising. Every question your teen asks, every interest they share, becomes fuel for targeted ads.

What makes this especially concerning for young learners is how invisible it becomes. Ads won’t look like ads. They’ll appear as “helpful” recommendations from an AI assistant your teenager has learned to trust. Thirty-six organisations, including children’s rights groups and consumer advocates, have formally asked the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate this surveillance‑driven marketing, warning of serious consequences for youth.

These tools were not built with your teenager’s learning or wellbeing in mind.

So can AI actually help learning?

Yes! But only when it’s designed and integrated the right way.

A 2025 randomised controlled trial by Harvard researchers (published in Scientific Reports) found that students using purpose‑built AI tutors learned significantly more, in less time, than students receiving the same content through traditional active classroom learning. They also reported higher engagement and motivation.

The key: the AI tutor was engineered around research‑based pedagogy — scaffolded content, immediate targeted feedback, active problem‑solving, and self‑pacing.

A separate systematic review in Science of Learning found that, when used thoughtfully in classrooms, AI tutoring systems consistently improved problem‑solving, critical thinking, and logical reasoning.

The distinction is crucial. AI that replaces thinking gives you that 17% drop in scores. AI that guides thinking — asking questions instead of just giving answers, keeping the learner doing the cognitive work — produces real gains in understanding.

This is the design philosophy behind Mindjoy.

What Mindjoy does differently and why teachers partner with us

Mindjoy is built from the ground up for learning, not engagement metrics.

1. AI tutors that guide thinking, not replace it

Educators create subject‑specific Mindjoy tutors aligned to their curriculum.
These tutors don’t just give answers; they ask probing questions, break problems into steps, and prompt students to explain their reasoning.
They can adapt to a learner’s level, offer hints rather than solutions, and keep the student in the “productive struggle” where real learning happens.

2. Pathways for deliberate practice

Teachers design “pathways” — structured sequences of lessons, questions, and reflections — tailored to what students are learning in class.
Within each pathway, learners practise key skills (e.g. core maths topics, writing, or science concepts) with graduated difficulty and built‑in scaffolding.
This turns AI from a generic homework helper into a guided practice environment aligned to your child’s actual schoolwork.

3. Instant feedback that supports mastery

As learners work through pathways or interact with tutors, they receive instant, targeted feedback: what they did well, where their reasoning slipped, and how to improve.
Instead of waiting days for a marked assignment, they can correct misconceptions in the moment, when it’s most powerful for learning.
This feedback is framed to build confidence and metacognition — helping students understand how they think, not just whether they are “right” or “wrong”.

4. Deep insights into learning for teachers

Mindjoy’s educator dashboard gives teachers a clear view of who’s engaging, who’s stuck, and where misconceptions are clustering.
They can see which questions students struggled with, which concepts need re‑teaching, and which learners are ready for extension.
This turns teaching from guesswork into precision: early interventions, better differentiation, and more meaningful support for each learner.

5. Human‑in‑the‑loop, with guardrails by design

At every meaningful step — what gets taught, how progress is assessed, when support is triggered — a teacher is in the loop. Mindjoy surfaces the data; educators make the decisions.
The platform includes safety and moderation guardrails designed specifically for school‑age learners, within the boundaries set by your child’s institution.
We’re actively building safeguards to protect student agency and wellbeing, not just their marks.

What this actually means for your teenager

How your teen will experience Mindjoy

They’ll use school‑designed pathways for practise and revision in key subjects.
They’ll have access to Mindjoy tutors that help them think through problems, not do the work for them.
They’ll get instant feedback as they learn, plus opportunities to reflect on their thinking.
Their teachers will see where they’re thriving and where they’re struggling — and can adjust instruction or support accordingly.

What educators say about Mindjoy

The clearest evidence of what Mindjoy does comes from the educators using it every day.

Candice Ellis, Head of Innovation at Uplands College, introduced Mindjoy because her boarding school students were going home to empty households with no one to help them. "I just want them to have a teacher in their pocket," she told us. What she found was that Mindjoy became a "co-teacher" available instantly to correct misconceptions before they compound. Students began putting pressure on other teachers to create Mindjoy bots when they didn't have one (full story here).

Dr Steve Balaka Opiyo, a post-doctoral lecturer who conducted a formal research study on Mindjoy, found it had a measurable positive impact on student engagement. After integrating Mindjoy, he noticed a decrease in absenteeism and an increase in motivation (full story here).

Dr Andrew Way, a civil engineering lecturer at Stellenbosch University, used Mindjoy to tackle a different problem: learners outsourcing their thinking to ChatGPT without critically evaluating the output. After implementing Mindjoy in tutorials, he noticed a meaningful shift students stopped asking surface-level questions that AI could instantly resolve, and started asking deeper conceptual questions. "That's really where the value lies," he said. "Education is a process. It's not just getting to the end of a tutorial. It's about mastering understanding.

What we’re asking of you

We don’t serve ads. We don’t train on your teenager’s conversations. We don’t optimise for “time on platform”. Our only measure of success is whether your teen actually learned something.

When your teenager has schoolwork to do, encourage them to open Mindjoy first — not ChatGPT or a general‑purpose AI chatbot. We want to help them build capability, not just complete tasks.

A simple question you can ask at home:
“Did you use Mindjoy to support you with that?”

If yes, ask what they learned, not only what they got done.

The bigger picture

We started Mindjoy because we believe the most important skill young people can develop isn’t any single subject. It’s the ability to learn, to think through hard problems, absorb feedback, and keep growing as the world changes around them.

AI isn’t going away. But learners who know how to use it as a tool for thinking rather than a replacement for thinking, or a platform designed to harvest their attention will have an extraordinary advantage.

If you have questions about how Mindjoy works, visit mindjoy.com or reach out to the teachers at your school or feel free to reach out to me directly.

Here’s to making learning awesome,

Gabi
CEO & Founder, Mindjoy