Learn with Hayden
Built by a dad. Tested by his kid.

Reading, spelling, and math games your kid actually wants to play.

Backed by scientific research.

Nine gentle games for curious kids, ages about 4 to 8. No ads, no chat, no in-app purchases — just the ones they actually ask to play.

$39 a year or $8 a month for the whole family, after a 5-day free trial. Already have a code? Join here.

Hayden, the app's cartoon mascot, waving hello
Nine games

One tap from the home screen

Every game a child can play lives on one friendly screen — big icons, their name at the top, nothing else competing for a tap.

The kid home screen: a greeting that says “Hi, Hayden!” above a grid of nine big game tiles.
  • Math Quest

    Seven quests that grow with your kid — from recognizing a number by ear to counting, then adding and subtracting up to 20. Ten quick tap-the-answer problems a round.

  • Memory Match

    Hunt for matching pairs on cards that show both a picture and its word. Find a pair and the app reads the word aloud and spells it out, letter by letter.

  • Word Builder

    Drag scrambled letter tiles into place to build the word. Three levels climb from three-letter words to five, with decoy tiles higher up.

  • Sound It Out

    Tap each letter to hear its sound, blend them into the whole word, then pick the picture it names. Later on the picture hides, so kids really have to sound it out.

  • Trace Quest

    Trace capital letters and numbers the way they're actually written — starting in the right place, moving in the right direction. Pick a letter, a number, or a word, including your child's own name.

  • Typing Box

    No buttons, no instructions — just a keyboard. Press a key and a big colorful letter appears and says its name; spell a real word and the box reads it back and cheers.

  • Money Quest

    Seven rooms to decorate, and every dollar is earned — quick math, spelling, or sounds "jobs" fill the piggy bank, then it's theirs to spend or save. Paying with a card spends the same "money". No in-app purchases, just "funny money".

  • Drawing Pad + My Art

    Fourteen colors, three brushes, and undo — draw, then save it to the gallery. Editing always makes a brand-new picture, and there's no delete for little hands, so the gallery only grows.

Grounded in research

The approach isn't guesswork

I'm a dad, not a researcher. So when I made a design choice — the endless try-again, the missing timer, the picture that disappears — I went looking for whether anyone had studied it. Mostly, someone had. Here's what's behind the decisions.

  • Nobody moves on until they've got it

    Math Quest won't hand your kid the next problem until this one is right. That idea is called mastery learning, and it's one of the most studied in education: across 36 studies it showed a medium-to-large benefit — and the benefit got bigger the higher the bar was set for "mastered." Ours is set at all of them.

  • There is no timer anywhere

    Math anxiety has been documented in children as young as five, and timed drills are one of its identified causes. Brain scans of seven-to-nine-year-olds show that kids who feel panicky about math have more activity in fear-related regions and less in the regions they need to actually solve the problem. So nothing here is ever on a clock.

  • Letters your kid can touch and hear

    The National Reading Panel's review of the research found that phonics practice where children handle actual letters was roughly twice as effective for reading as sound-only practice. Word Builder has your kid dragging real letters into place. Sound It Out has them tapping each letter to hear it. That's the whole design.

  • The picture goes away on purpose

    Teaching kids to check the illustration when they hit a hard word was standard practice for decades, and the research has turned firmly against it: it trains guessing instead of decoding, and leaves children stranded once the pictures stop. In Sound It Out, the answer is hidden during the choice. My kid found the loophole before I did.

  • Praise, never prizes

    The research on rewards is clear and a little counterintuitive: expected, tangible rewards reduce a child's interest in the activity itself, and they do it more to children than to adults — while plain positive feedback increases it. So there is no currency here, no store, no streak to protect. Just a silly celebration and someone telling your kid they did well.

  • Wrong answers that are actually tempting

    In Math Quest, the wrong choices sit close to the right one. That's on purpose — plausible wrong answers make a child stop and work it out, while obviously-silly ones can be dismissed at a glance and teach nothing. It also means that when your kid does miss, the miss tells us something real, which is what the parent view reads.

Every claim on this page traces back to published research. The papers, in plain English →

The part parents love

Know what to practice tonight

You don't get a wall of charts to decode. The app watches the misses, names the actual pattern in plain words — like mixing up 6 and 9 — and hands you one small thing to try together.

A screen recording of the parent coaching panel: the specific problems a child missed, a chart of how they are trending, and one suggested thing to practice together.
  1. Watches the misses
  2. Names the pattern in plain words
  3. Hands you one small thing to try together
What's not in here

Nine games, and nothing else

No feed to scroll, no store to wander into, nobody trying to sell your kid anything. Hand over the tablet and go start dinner.

  • No ads. Not now, not ever.
  • No links out — nowhere for a kid to wander off to.
  • No autoplay video pulling them along.
  • One subscription for the whole family — nothing to buy inside the app.
  • Every family's data is walled off from every other family's.
  • No punishing streaks to keep up.
  • Nothing borrowed from slot machines — no prize wheels, no jackpots.
  • Made by a parent, not an ad company.
The Hayden mascot with a finger to her chin, thinking
Why it exists

Built by a dad for his own kid

The friendly girl waving at the top is Hayden, the app's mascot — a cartoon of my own daughter, drawn from the little watercolor paintings I make of her. This started at a kitchen table, not a boardroom: a handful of little games I made for her, grown one "can we add this?" at a time into what you're looking at now.

Hayden was always eager to learn — she wanted to. But I couldn't find games that fed that without ads and trackers, let alone anything that showed me what she was excelling at and where she was struggling. So we built the games she deserved, together.

Then she asked me to share them — 'so other kids can learn too!' So here we are.

Hayden's dad
The practical stuff

Made for real family devices

  • Any screen you already have

    A phone handed back on a long drive, the tablet on a flight, the family laptop at the kitchen table — it runs in any modern browser, with nothing to install.

  • A profile for every kid

    Add each child in your family their own profile, with their own progress, artwork, and avatar.

  • Read aloud everywhere

    Buttons, words, and prompts can be read out loud, so pre-readers aren't stuck.

  • Picks up on any device

    Progress and saved artwork sync, so a drawing started on the tablet is there on the laptop.

  • A grown-ups-only corner

    Settings and progress live behind a simple grown-ups gate kids can't wander into.

A screen recording of the parent settings area, showing each child's progress, the per-game on/off toggles, and the avatar picker.
The grown-ups' side: each child's games, avatar, and saved art, all in one place.
Get started

Try it with your kid

Five days free, then $39 a year or $8 a month for your whole family — however many kids you have. Cancel any time from the grown-ups area.

Good questions

A few things parents ask

How much does it cost?
$39 a year or $8 a month for your whole family, however many kids you have — the yearly plan works out about 59% cheaper. Either way the first 5 days are free: we ask for a card up front, and your card is charged when the trial ends unless you cancel first. You can cancel any time from the grown-ups area, and there's nothing extra to buy inside the app.
What ages is it for?
Roughly ages 4 to 8 — from a child just learning their letters and numbers up through early reading and arithmetic.
What do we need to play?
A tablet, laptop, or phone with a modern web browser. There's nothing to download and no app store involved.
Is my kid's data safe?
Yes. There are no ads and no trackers inside the app, and each family's data is walled off from every other. The privacy policy spells out exactly what's collected and why, in plain English.
Is any of this actually based on research?
Yes — and each game's Learn more panel tells you which findings it's built on. There's a plain-English summary with the actual papers on the research page. One caveat I'd rather say out loud: the app itself hasn't been through a study. What I can tell you is that the teaching approaches inside it are the ones the research supports.
Can I add more than one child?
Yes — each child gets their own profile and their own progress, artwork, and avatar, all under your one account, at no extra cost.
Who built this?
One dad, for his own kid. The origin story is up above — the short version is that it's a small, personal project made with a lot of care.