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Solar Tutor

An offline AI tutor for classrooms with no reliable internet.

Solar Tutor preview
Amina Okonkwo
Lagos, Nigeria 🇳🇬

What I’m building

Solar Tutor runs a small quantized model directly on a solar-charged tablet, so a student can ask questions in English or Yoruba and get a patient, grade-appropriate explanation — no bars of signal required. Teachers load the term’s curriculum once over a weak connection; after that everything happens on-device.

Why I’m building it

I taught for six years in schools where the internet arrived for twenty minutes a day, if at all. The kids weren’t behind because they were slow. They were behind because a single teacher can’t sit with forty students at once. A tutor that never gets tired and never leaves changes that math.

What the tokens unlock

The pledged credits pay for the cloud usage I can’t do on-device: distilling a bigger teacher-model into the tiny one that ships on the tablet, and grading the open-ended answers students give so the on-device model learns what a good explanation looks like.

  1. ✓
    Distill the curriculum tutor model for on-device use1M
  2. ✓
    Build & test the Yoruba + English answer grading loop2M
  3. 3
    Evaluate against real student questions from 3 schools1M
  4. 4
    Package and deploy the first 50-tablet pilot1M

Tools & models

Llama 3.1 8B (on-device)WhisperGPT-4o (grading)
aminao/solar-tutorLive prototype

The builder

Amina Okonkwo

Lagos, Nigeria 🇳🇬

Ex-classroom teacher turned engineer. I build learning tools that work when the internet doesn’t. Obsessed with tiny models on cheap hardware.

GitHub connectedShipped a project beforeOpen-source contributor

Updates

  1. First on-device answers are… actually good

    Got the 8B distill running on a $90 tablet. Latency is ~4s per answer with no network. Sharing a clip with supporters this week.

  2. Curriculum ingestion done

    Loaded the full Oyo State primary curriculum. Next: the grading loop, which is where most of the pledged credits go.

FAQ

Does it really work offline?
Yes — the tutor model runs on the device. Only content sync and grading touch the cloud.
Which schools first?
Three government primary schools in Oyo State that already piloted the paper version.

Supporters

41 people have pledged so far.

  • Rae ColemanChicago, USA· 2d ago

    “Rooting for you. This should exist.”

    100KAI Credits
  • Ken WatanabeTokyo, Japan· 4d ago
    500KOpenAI
  • María TorresBarcelona, Spain· 6d ago

    “Take my credits and go build it.”

    250KCompute
  • Anonymous supporter· 8d ago
    1MClaude
  • Anonymous supporter· 10d ago
    500KGemini

Discussion

Ask the builder a question or leave encouragement.

  • Ken Watanabe2d ago

    Pledged. The offline-first choice is the whole ballgame. Keep going.

  • Amina OkonkwoBuilder3d ago

    Great question — the on-device model answers general questions too, it just won’t be graded against the curriculum. That grading loop is exactly what the credits fund.

  • Rae Coleman4d ago

    How are you handling students who ask questions outside the loaded curriculum?