About TalkingPencil

What this is

TalkingPencil is a supplementary learning resource — the role a tutorial centre plays, in a browser and at no cost. Students get somewhere else to learn a topic, practise it, and check what they actually understand.

Topics follow the Hong Kong curriculum's structure, so a P4 student looking for fractions finds fractions at P4. We do not follow any particular textbook, and we are not tied to what your school covered this week.

How the content is made

The questions are generated by software and artificial intelligence, then checked by several independent automated layers before anything is published. We say this plainly because you should be able to judge the content knowing where it came from.

For mathematics, the answers are not written by an AI at all. A program generates the numbers and computes the answer with exact arithmetic, and a second, separately written implementation has to agree with it before the question can exist. That is why mathematics came first.

Wrong options are not filler. Each one represents a specific mistake students actually make, so when a child picks one, we can say what the thinking behind it was rather than only that it was wrong.

What we do not do

• ·No advertising, ever. Income comes from subscriptions only.
• ·No chat, comments, friend lists, or any way for users to contact each other.
• ·No public leaderboards or comparisons between children.
• ·No copying of textbooks or past public examination papers.
• ·No selling of anyone's data, at any price.

Where we are going

Hong Kong first, and properly. Mathematics is furthest along; English, Chinese, Science and Humanities follow. The long-term aim is to serve students anywhere, but a platform that is vague everywhere helps nobody, so we are being specific here before going wider.