Getting started
Sign in, then add a profile for your child — their name, age and year group. You also choose a name for their tutor, which is the character they’ll be talking to. Some children like naming it themselves; it makes the whole thing feel more like theirs.
After that, your child opens the app, taps their card, and starts asking questions. There’s nothing to install and nothing to set up per subject — they can just say what they’re stuck on.
How the tutor helps
Pippenello doesn’t hand over answers. It asks questions back — what have you tried, what does this word mean, what would happen if — and nudges your child towards working it out themselves. That’s deliberate, and it’s the whole point: a child who has been walked to the answer remembers the walk, not the answer.
It also means the first few minutes can feel slower than a search engine. That’s normal. If your child says “it won’t just tell me”, it’s working.
Questions are pitched at the year group on the profile, following the national curriculum, so a Year 4 child and a Year 6 child asking the same question get different conversations.
Why not just use ChatGPT?
It’s a fair question, and worth answering honestly: Pippenello is built on the same kind of technology. The difference isn’t the engine, it’s everything built around it.
A general assistant is designed to be helpful by answering. Ask one for help with long division and it will show you long division, beautifully. That’s the right behaviour for an adult at work and the wrong one for a child with homework — it’s the difference between a finished worksheet and a child who can do the next one.
Pippenello is set up the opposite way round:
- It won’t give the answer. It asks one guiding question at a time, and only offers a small hint after your child has tried twice.
- It knows what your child has been taught. The topics for their exact year group are in front of it, so a Year 4 explanation doesn’t reach for Year 7 methods — which is how children end up doing it “a different way from school”.
- It talks like a tutor for that age. Short replies, simple words for younger children, and never more than a few sentences at a time.
- It stays on schoolwork. Anything off-topic gets a kind redirect, and anything upsetting or grown-up isn’t answered — your child is told it’s a question for a grown-up. You’d see it in the transcript; nothing is sent to you at the time.
- You can see all of it. Every session is yours to read back, which isn’t true of a chat window on a general service.
There’s also the practical point that most general AI services aren’t intended for children to hold their own accounts on, and homework set by your child’s teacher arrives here already loaded and ready to work through.
Profiles
Each child gets their own card on the front screen, with their own colour, emoji and tutor. Sessions, homework and progress are kept per child — siblings never see each other’s conversations.
You can add a note to the tutor on any profile — things like “please encourage her to show her working” or “he’s preparing for SATs”. The tutor keeps it in mind every session.
If your child’s school uses Pippenello
Teachers can link a child to their class. Ask your child’s teacher for their invite code, then go to the grown-ups area, find the child, and choose Link a teacher.
A child linked to a class:
- chats without the daily message limit
- doesn’t count towards the free plan’s one-child allowance, so a sibling can still use their free place
- gets homework their teacher sets, and weekly progress summaries
- shows their teacher’s name on their card, so you can see at a glance who’s there through school
Homework
When a teacher sets homework, it appears as a badge on your child’s card. Tapping it starts a session about that particular task, with the worksheet already loaded — your child doesn’t need to photograph or re-type anything.
You can see everything that’s been set, and whether it was opened and worked on, in the Homework tab of the grown-ups area.
Worksheet photos
On the Family plan, your child can photograph a page they’re stuck on and work through it with the tutor. It reads the sheet and then does the usual thing — asks rather than tells.
Photos work best in decent light, with the page flat and filling most of the frame. If the tutor isn’t sure it read something correctly it will say so rather than guess, which is the behaviour you want when the alternative is confidently solving the wrong sum.
The grown-ups area
The grown-ups area is behind a PIN you set, so it stays yours even on a shared tablet. Inside you can:
- add, edit and remove children
- read full transcripts of every session
- generate a progress summary for any period
- see homework set by school and what happened with it
- link a teacher, manage your plan, and turn summary emails on or off
Transcripts are complete. If you want to know how a session actually went — rather than how it was reported at dinner — it’s all there.
Plans and limits
Free gives you one child and 20 messages a day, with text questions.
Family (£4.99 a month) removes the daily message limit, lets you add more children, and adds worksheet photos, the full dashboard and a weekly summary emailed to you on Sundays.
Children linked to a class sit outside these limits — they don’t use your free place and they aren’t capped daily, whatever plan you’re on. What they don’t get on the free plan is photographing their own pages, which stays a Family feature.
On the free plan you’ll see a warning once a child has used 15 of the day’s 20 messages. The count resets overnight.
Privacy and safety
Conversations are stored so you can read them back and so summaries can be produced. Photos are different: a photo is sent once so the tutor can read it, and isn’t kept on our servers afterwards.
The grown-ups area is PIN-protected, and children never see the dashboard, other children’s sessions, or your billing details. Teachers linked to your child can see that child’s homework activity and progress — not your account or your other children.
Common questions
Will it just do the homework for them? No — that’s the one thing it’s built not to do. It asks questions back. If your child wants an answer handed over, they’ll find it frustrating at first.
What if it gets something wrong? It can. It’s a good tutor, not an infallible one, and it’s most likely to slip on a badly-lit photo or an unusual question. Transcripts are there so you can check anything that looks off.
My child moved up a year — do I need to do anything? Edit their profile and save it. The year group only takes effect when the profile is saved.
Can two children share one profile? Better not to. Progress summaries, homework and the tutor’s sense of what your child can already do all assume one child per profile.
How do I cancel? In the grown-ups area, under Settings. You keep Family features until the end of the period you’ve paid for, and you can undo a cancellation before it takes effect.