Friction in the Right Places

I built BrainBike around one idea: make it easy for the parent to coach, and hard, but not too hard, for the child to learn. That's it.

That might sound unappealing, or seem like I'm just offering a clunky, less efficient product than the competition. However, it's by design. Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation argues that the smartphone-and-social-media era didn't just distract kids. It rewired childhood itself, replacing supervised, effortful, real-world activity with unsupervised, frictionless, screen-based activity. I read that argument and agreed with it. I'd also watched the same thing play out with actual students. Given any path of least resistance, in a classroom or on almost any online platform, most children (even yours) will take it, and learn next to nothing in the process. So I did something about it.

Most edtech solves the wrong friction problem

The standard pitch for an education app is to remove friction. Make it more fun, more automatic, more addictive, so the kid does more of it. Gamification, streaks, badges, points. Hit their dopamine centres, and keep them hooked. Hooked on learning. But it doesn't actually work that way. They learn the wrong lesson from these sites. They learn that learning is quick, easy and lightweight.

I didn't want to build that. I want there to be friction. Not the sort that grinds them to a halt, but that nudges them to slow down and think.

Friction in the right places

A worksheet is paper. There's no hint button. No "reveal answer." No skip. Your child can't open a new tab and type the question into Google or ChatGPT. Sitting with a pencil and a printed page, they have exactly one way through a question they find hard: think about it.

That's deliberate, and it's the opposite of how most learning software gets built. Software that lets a child self-serve out of the hard part isn't neutral, it actively works against the thing it claims to teach. Every hint, shortcut, or "try again" that arrives frictionlessly is one more signal to your child that effort is optional.

Frictionless in the right places

Not for you, though.

You don't have to track your child's progress, decide what to practise next, find appropriately-pitched questions, or judge whether something is too easy or too hard. That's coaching expertise, and I didn't want you to need it. The system already knows the schedule, tracks the gaps, and prints exactly five questions calibrated to where your child actually is. Your job shrinks down to three things: hand over the worksheet, talk through their answers with them, and rate the results afterward, one tap per question.

The division of labour

Put the two together and here's the shape I actually built: the site makes the coaching decisions, you enact them, teaching your child that you value learning Mathematics, and your child does the training. Each of us carries exactly the amount of friction that belongs to our part.

Your child gets friction, because struggle is where the learning happens, and a device that removes it removes the point of the exercise.

You get ease, because planning and levelling is exactly the kind of decision fatigue that causes most home practice routines to peter out.

You get thorough, varied written solutions to the day's problems. You'll probably improve your own understanding of Mathematics along the way. When they get a question wrong, you discuss it with them, and they'll see a similar question within a few days to have another try. When they get a question right, they know they earned it.

If that's the kind of practice you want in your house, the free trial is the fastest way to see it run for real. If you're not ready for that yet, subscribe to the newsletter, I'll send more of this kind of thing as it's written, not sales pitches.