Sconce

An AI coach for students who struggle with executive function.

Sconce helps middle and high school students stay on top of school — organizing assignments, planning their day, breaking big things into doable pieces — without making them do data entry to get there.

Alpha · small set of families

What it is

Sconce is a private, AI-powered coach a student talks to about school. The coach knows the student's classes, what's due, and what they've shared, and it nudges, scaffolds, and plans alongside them. It's built for the kid who has trouble starting things, who forgets, who feels overwhelmed by the pile — the kid for whom traditional planners and apps that require data entry don't work, because the data entry is exactly the executive-function deficit the tool is supposed to help with.

The coach captures assignments and plans automatically as they come up in conversation. The student doesn't fill in forms; they talk, and the system listens. The parent sees a shared task list and a dashboard, but they don't see the conversations.

Kid chat — coach noticing the student doesn't have an address for an upcoming activity, offering to add it or ping a parent

Kid chat. Coach noticing a missing transit address and offering low-friction ways to resolve it.

Parent dashboard — daily timeline showing transits, school day, and one item the kid needs help with

Parent dashboard. The day at a glance: transits, school, and one specific thing the kid needs help with.

Mockups from the in-progress visual design pass; placeholder names ("Zoe," "Coach Dave's") are stand-ins.

Who built it and why

Sconce is built and operated by Karl Kahn — a parent of two boys, one of whom needs this kind of scaffolding. Karl is forming Sconce LLC in Washington, DC. The product started as a tool for his own family and is being opened to a small set of friends and families before any wider rollout.

Where the data lives

Storage

Local SQLite database, one per student. Family-owned.

Hosting

Cloudflare Pages + Workers. Operator-managed; no third-party SaaS holding student records.

AI model

Anthropic Claude. Per Anthropic's policy, conversations aren't used to train models.

Sharing

No advertisers. No analytics resold. No data brokers. No model training on student data.

What it deliberately doesn't do

No peer-facing features. Students don't message each other through Sconce. There are no public profiles, no leaderboards, no follower counts.
No required data entry from the kid. The whole product premise is that data entry is the failure mode for executive-function-impaired students.
No selling, no ads. Sconce is a paid product (eventually), not an ad-supported one.
No replacing therapists or teachers. The coach is CBT-aware in tone but doesn't run formal therapy, doesn't diagnose, and surfaces serious situations to parents.

For schools and school IT

If you're a school IT admin reviewing this for a network whitelist

The domain you'd be allowing is sconce.dev (and subdomains *.sconce.dev). Sconce is a parent-facing tool for individual families — it doesn't read from or write to school systems unless a family separately connects an LMS like Canvas, and even then the connection lives in the family's own account.

There's no SSO, no roster sync, no aggregated student data going anywhere. Each student's data sits in a SQLite file scoped to that one student. From the school's perspective, allowing sconce.dev is the same shape of decision as allowing a personal productivity app — closer to a homework planner than to a SaaS vendor.

For specific questions, IT contact is [email protected] — Karl is the operator and can answer technical questions directly.

What the kid does on the network

Loads sconce.dev in a browser (or installs as a PWA).
Sends and receives chat messages with the coach (HTTPS to sconce.dev).
Optionally uploads photos of assignment sheets or voice notes — these go to the family's storage, not to a central pool.
No video, no real-time peer chat, no streaming.

For families

Sconce is in alpha and not yet broadly available. If you've found this page through a friend, contact [email protected] — Karl is onboarding new families one at a time. Existing alpha families have direct intake links.

I'm a student — open the coach I'm a parent — dashboard Set up a new student

Privacy and AI disclosure

Sconce uses AI (Anthropic's Claude) for the coaching conversation. Every interaction labeled "Coach" is an AI system, not a human. Full plain-language disclosure on the privacy page. A lawyer-reviewed version is in progress.

Status, honestly

Sconce is being actively built. As of June 2026, a few students across a couple of families are using it, and the coach can now reach students by text message (SMS coaching went live after carrier verification). The architecture, the design, and the privacy posture are all real and in production. The scale is small on purpose — Sconce is being shaped one family at a time before a wider opening.