What Did Former Googlers Do to Save Kids from 'Boring' Texts?
Three former Google employees have created an app that responds to children's endless 'whys' not with ChatGPT walls of text, but with interactive AI adventures. Meet 'Sparkli' and its claim to fundamentally shake up education.
The other day, my six-year-old nephew grabbed my hand, looked me straight in the eyes, and asked, "Uncle, why do stars twinkle?" I froze. The explanation I pulled up and read from ChatGPT extinguished that magical curiosity in his eyes in an instant. What we faced was just a 'wall of text'. It was precisely this disappointment that spurred three names from Google's corridors into action: Sparkli.
Why Isn't Text Enough? Because Children Want an 'Experience'
Lax Poojary, Lucie Marchand, and Myn Kang. All are Google veterans, all are parents. And all have tasted the helplessness of not being able to give sufficiently 'engaging' answers to their children's questions, just like I experienced. As Poojary says: "Children are inherently very curious. My son would ask me how cars work or how rain falls. I used ChatGPT or Gemini to explain this to a six-year-old, but what we got was still a wall of text. What children want is an interactive experience."
This is Sparkli's starting point. To explain what Mars is like, fifty years ago we would have shown a picture, ten years ago a video. Now? With Sparkli, children can walk on Mars, experience it. This is more like a live expedition than a cold AI chat bot. We had already seen teams setting out with a similar spirit in Google's internal startup incubator, Area 120. However, Sparkli's focus isn't just on play; there's deep pedagogy at its core.
AI is Just a Tool, The Real Issue is 'Safe and Effective Learning'
Many startups use AI as an attraction and neglect the background. Sparkli has done the opposite. Their first two hires were a PhD expert in educational sciences and AI, and a teacher. Why? Because platforms like OpenAI and Character.ai are currently facing lawsuits over allegations that they have caused harm to children. Safety is quite literally a matter of life and death.
Sparkli uses generative AI to instantly produce all media content (visual, audio, video). When a child asks a question, they can create a personalized learning 'expedition' within two minutes. The goal is to shorten this time even further. But the truly clever part is positioning this technology as a 'tool' while always keeping the child's cognitive development and safety at the forefront. This is a much more responsible approach than the iterative errors we see in Google's personal assistants, which claim to understand the user.
Reaching Places the Education System Cannot
Sparkli's claim is ambitious: to teach children modern concepts (design skills, financial literacy, entrepreneurship) that school curricula cannot keep up with. The app allows exploring predefined topics or letting the child write their own question to create a completely personalized learning path. Daily highlighted new topics, sections blended with voice narration, videos, images, puzzles, and games... And most importantly: adventures where you can choose your own path, without the pressure of 'right' or 'wrong'.
Here, AI is not a content-producing factory, but a learning partner. The system can adjust its narration and difficulty based on the child's progress. So it's not a static textbook, but a live, breathing teacher.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Sparkli really safe?
The team prioritizes safety above all. Their first hires being education and AI safety experts is proof of this. The content creation process is protected by layers that filter out harmful or inappropriate material. The goal is to provide a closed, controlled learning environment aligned with pedagogical principles.
Can this app replace school?
No, and it shouldn't. Sparkli positions itself as a complement to school or a tool that nurtures the child's curiosity outside of school. The aim is not to change the curriculum, but to connect the child's natural learning instinct with the limitless resources technology provides.
Why did former Google employees move into this field?
Their technical depth and product-focused thinking skills give them the authority to build a complex AI product. However, the main driving force was their personal parenting experiences. They saw that big tech wasn't producing sufficiently 'human' solutions for children and wanted to fill that gap.
