A free, private tool for teaching students to break a problem down themselves.

Three quarters of students already use AI for schoolwork

The Education Review Office found around 75% of students using AI for schoolwork, and named the problem plainly: cognitive offloading. Students getting an answer without building the reasoning that produces one.

The answer is not to ban the tools. It is to teach the thing the tools cannot do for you, and to give students somewhere to practise it.

Thinking is the first of the five key competencies in the New Zealand Curriculum. It is also the hardest one to hand a student something concrete to do. Greggle is a place to do it.

What a student actually does

They name the thing. A goal, a project, a problem, a decision. Then they cut it into steps. Any step they cannot do yet opens into a board of its own, and they keep cutting until a step is small enough to just do.

When they cannot see how to cut it, they pick a method. Twenty-four of them, including 5 Whys, Pre-mortem, Working Backwards, First Principles and Force Field Analysis. A method is a set of questions in an order that stops you lying to yourself. It proposes a breakdown, one step at a time, and the student accepts, changes or rejects each one. Nothing is added to their board unless they put it there.

Progress shows as a count, three of eleven, not a percentage. Percentages flatter. Counts are honest.

See the ways of thinking, each with where it came from and how to run it on paper.

It is built to become unnecessary

The guidance fades. The more a student uses a method, the less Greggle explains it, because the aim is for the questions to end up in their head rather than on the screen.

That is the opposite of how most software is designed. Nothing here is trying to increase time on task or bring students back tomorrow. A student who has internalised how to break a problem down and stopped opening Greggle is the success case, not churn.

You can see the thinking, not just the answer

A finished board is a record of how a student got somewhere. You can see where they split a problem sensibly and where they gave up and made one enormous vague step. That is a conversation you cannot have about a paragraph a chatbot wrote.

Boards export as a file. Students can hand one in, carry it between home and school, or delete it when they are done.

There is no student data

Most tools ask you to trust a privacy policy. Greggle removes the question. No accounts, so nothing to sign up with. No server, so nowhere for work to go. No analytics, no tracking, no third-party scripts. The app is blocked at browser level from making any outbound connection at all, and a test in the build fails if that ever changes.

For your school that means no data processing agreement, no privacy impact assessment and no conversation about hosting, because nothing is collected in the first place.

Check it yourself, in ten seconds

1. Turn off the wifi and keep working. Everything carries on. Software that needed to send data somewhere could not do that.
2. Watch the Network tab in your browser’s developer tools while a student uses it. After the page loads there are no outgoing requests.
3. Read the Content-Security-Policy in the page source. It is a short instruction to the browser to refuse outbound connections. Your IT staff will recognise it.

One-page privacy summary for your board or privacy officer, made to print, also as a PDF.

What it costs

Today, nothing. The app is free for everyone, every method included, with no limits and no expiry. School licences are planned and are not on sale yet; when they arrive, the free version stays free and a licence will add the classroom material. The intended prices, so nobody has to ask:

There is no per-student pricing, because there is no way to count students. No accounts means no seats to buy, provision or remove at the end of the year. You get one licence key and a link.

Schools will be invoiced. Purchase order, bank transfer, 20th of the month following. No card checkout, no subscription to cancel, no auto-renewal. The licence terms are published now, so you can read them before asking.

Ask to be told when licences are available

Classroom material is being written now

Lesson sequences, worked examples and a teacher guide, built with teachers rather than at them. It is not finished, and I would rather write it with a few teachers looking over it than guess.

Email me and I will tell you when it is ready, and ask you what should be in it. Nothing else, ever. The app still collects nothing; this is an email to a person.