Today we are releasing Fikira for Mac and Windows. Fikira is a study companion for students, teachers and families. You tell it which course you are taking or teaching, and it helps you work through that course week by week, with practice built from the course itself and a tutor that asks you questions instead of handing over answers. The name is Kiswahili for thoughts, or reflection, which is what we hope people come away with.
Why we built it
Most of us at Frame the Change LAB have spent our careers in classrooms and training programs in the United States, Morocco and Kenya. Over the past two years, the same conversation kept coming up with the teachers we work with. Their students had tools that could write any essay and answer any problem set, and the response at school was usually to try to catch it, ban it, or look the other way. None of those options helps a student learn the material.
What bothered us most was how the tools themselves were designed. They are built to produce things: an essay, a summary, a lesson plan. A student who is handed the answer has not built the understanding, and a parent who is handed a summary still does not know how to help at the kitchen table. We wanted a tool built around a different question, which is what it actually takes for this person to understand this material and still remember it next month.
How it works
For teachers. Upload your syllabus and Fikira drafts a course map with your weeks, learning outcomes and assessments. You review it and fix anything it got wrong before students see it. Fikira also reads your assignments and points out the ones a student could hand straight to a chatbot, with suggestions for redesigning them so students have to show their thinking. When you are ready, you publish the course with a code and can see which students have joined and where they are in the course.
For students. Join your class with the code your teacher gives you, or start with any subject and level on your own. Fikira lays out a week-by-week study plan and builds flashcards, quizzes and practice tests from your course content rather than from a generic question bank. When you are stuck, Ask Fikira works through the problem with you using questions, explanations and worked examples. It keeps track of what you have practiced and missed, so a student who keeps getting percentage problems wrong will see more of them, explained a different way, before the course moves on.
For families. Parents and caregivers get plain-language guidance on what their child is studying and simple questions to ask at home. You do not need to know the subject to be useful.
Built to run on your own computer
Fikira runs an open AI model on your own computer by default, so it works without a paid subscription and your study sessions stay on your device. If you already pay for an AI service you can connect it, but you never have to. Learners in low and middle income countries keep free access while they are enrolled in a course, which has been part of the plan from the start.
How people are using it
Teachers and students in our early pilots have been using Fikira in a few ways.
- Course redesign. Teachers bring an existing syllabus and its assignments. Fikira flags the tasks that are easy to hand off to AI, explains why, and suggests versions that ask students to show their work.
- One course, many paces. A single course code brings a whole class into the same course, while each student works at their own pace and level. The teacher sees the group without managing thirty separate plans.
- Help after school hours. Students who have no one at home to explain the material use Ask Fikira the way better-resourced students use a private tutor.
- College courses without much structure. University students use it to plan their studying for courses with no fixed pacing and to prepare for exams with timed practice tests.
- Parents who feel shut out. Parents use parent mode to understand what their child is learning and how to talk about it at home.
What Fikira will not do
We made a few firm choices. Fikira will not write a student’s essay, summarize a reading so a student can skip it, or produce a finished lesson plan for a teacher to paste in. Each of those saves time in the moment and costs the learning the assignment was there for. A student should finish a session having thought harder than when they started, and a teacher should finish with a clearer picture of their course and their students.
Get started
Fikira is free to download for Mac (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows. Students can start with any subject and level in a few minutes, teachers can build and publish a course the same day, and families can add a parent profile alongside a student account. We would love to hear from you at fikira@framethechangelab.com.