The LinkedIn Article

Many years ago, while living in Rajkot, I noticed something interesting.

In the area I lived in, there were many young mothers. Most were college educated. Most had children under five years of age. Because of family and social circumstances, they were not working outside the home.

But they had something very valuable: time, education, and a desire to do the best for their own children.

At the time, I wondered: What if we could send these mothers a simple weekly activity plan on their phones?

Not a lesson. Not a course.

Just a set of fun, age-appropriate activities they could do at home with their own children.

For example, during Janmashtami, a three-year-old might hear a simple story about Krishna, learn a few new words, count butter balls made from cotton, and sing a rhyme. A five-year-old could do more advanced activities based on the same theme.

Today, AI makes this idea much easier to implement.

An AI system could generate personalized weekly activity packs based on:

The result?

Children receive rich early-learning experiences before entering school.

Mothers become active partners in their children's education.

And all this happens at home, using a smartphone and everyday household materials.

Sometimes the best educational resources are already present in a community. We simply need to connect them.

The idea has a name: Pehla Guru.
Har maa-baap apne bacche ke pehle guru hote hain.

And one more important point:

Pehla Guru is not a child learning app. It is a parent empowerment app.

The app is designed for the mother (or parent), not the child. The screen does not teach the child. The app helps parents become more confident, capable and engaged as their child's first teacher.

Wish someone would help me build this.

How to move forward

What we need to do is to gather a group of experts in Early Childhood Care and Education and a group of experts in the local language. Each expert will use AI to generate resources of different kinds: songs, stories (to be told by the mother!), simple activities (make a flag of India using different coloured dals or flowers), health related information ("It is time to get your child vaccinated"), etc. The resource would be vetted by the expert and the language used be checked by a language expert. Once this is certified, the activity would be added to a database and the app would take over.

The app, which is straightforward to write, would start by registering a child through its mother. Once registered, the app will deliver every week a set of activities that would be appropriate for the child's age. The mother would be able to click on an activity to provide feedback on how her child liked the activity. The app will also let the mother store information about the child's health and development. More features may be added later, but this part of the project does not require any AI.

Thus, in this project, AI will function as an assistant to create resources. The final choice of resources will remain controlled by human experts; what AI will do is to drastically reduce the time taken to create them! While a human expert may take hours to come up with a nice song, AI can do it in minutes, even if the quality of an AI song can never approach that of a human's song!

Interested?

Do Email me! Or WhatsApp me!