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Family-centered Chinese literacy

Live prototype / 2026

Magic Literacy Garden

A private-source learning product that helps families turn character practice into short, guided sessions with a shared progress loop.

01 / Overview

Magic Literacy Garden is a family learning product for Chinese character practice. Parents manage the learning set and children move through focused practice, review and a small garden progress loop without needing separate child accounts.

02 / The question

What needed to be understood?

A literacy tool for young children needs more structure than an open-ended AI tutor. It must keep sessions short, make progress legible to parents and use audio and rewards without turning practice into a noisy interface.

03 / The build

How the project approached it

  1. Designed separate parent, child and administrator paths around one family account model.
  2. Built guided learning and review flows with retry and delayed-repeat feedback.
  3. Connected Azure Speech audio with a browser fallback so character prompts remain usable across devices.
  4. Deployed the frontend and API independently on Cloudflare Pages, Workers and D1.

04 / Current state

What remains

The product is live as a private-source prototype at words.rowanliu.com. The current work is product validation: improving the learning loop and finding a practical path to reach families before expanding the feature set.