User guide
Parent & guardian guide
Your child talks with a tutor that asks rather than tells — and you see everything. This guide walks you through setting your child up, what your consent unlocks, the controls you hold, and how to read the evidence like a parent, not a statistician.
Setting up your child
Getting started takes one short request and one decision. The request — made through the sign-up wizard — asks for your invitation to the Private Preview; the decision — the consent step — is where you tell us exactly what the tutor is allowed to do with your child.
- Request an invitation. Start with the sign-up wizard. Tell us who will learn — your child, yourself, or both — and how many learners; the wizard ends by sending us your invitation request.
- Receive your sign-in details. The team sets up your account and replies, usually within one business day (EU & US business hours), with your sign-in details and a secure Stripe link to put a card on file — nothing is charged at setup.
- Sign in. Go to www.lucaexpress.com and open LucaAIstein (🧠) from the app menu. Once signed in, the direct link is www.lucaexpress.com/lucaaistein/index.html.
- Complete the consent step. For a child, this comes before anything else — the tutor will not score your child or speak with them until your consent is on record.
The Private Preview is invitation-based and limited to the first 50 customers. The monthly platform fee is on us during the Private Preview — you pay only for what you use, at the usage rates on our pricing page. Once the 50 places are full, new requests join the waitlist for general availability.
Why the consent step is fail-closed
Most software asks for permission and carries on if the answer is unclear. LucaAIstein does the opposite. Until your consent is recorded, the tutor will not score your child, will not speak with them by voice, and will not capture their handwriting. Missing consent never defaults to "on" — it means those features simply do not exist for your child yet.
We call this fail-closed: whenever there is any doubt, the system protects first. Adults consent for themselves; for a minor, that decision is yours — and nothing in the product can route around you.
What your consent unlocks
- Scoring — the continuous six-metric assessment that powers the mastery map, the trajectory charts, and every number you will ever see. Without it, there are no scores at all.
- Voice — read-aloud, dictation, and pronunciation practice, granted as its own separate consent.
- Handwriting — Analog Practice's handwriting capture, where a photo of your child's written work is converted to text on the device and scored as a work sample. The photo itself never leaves the device.
Consent is granular — scoring, voice, and handwriting are each recorded separately — and every grant can be revoked at any time. Your consent history is kept as an append-only ledger, so there is always an exact record of what you allowed and when.
What you can see
Everything. Full oversight is not a premium feature or a report we email you quarterly — it is how LucaAIstein is built. You see the lessons, the questions the tutor asked, your child's answers, and the evidence behind every number. Three views do most of the work:
Trajectory
Each of the six metrics, per subject, over time. You watch skills strengthen week by week — and you see dips too, because honest lines wobble.
Mastery map
Every skill marked conquered, in progress, or locked. One glance tells you where your child stands and what the tutor is working toward next.
Work samples
The actual work — problems solved, passages read, handwriting scored. Not summaries of work; the work.
Every number traces to something real. Behind each score is a recorded event — a question answered, a problem worked, a re-check passed. Nothing is estimated into existence and nothing is fabricated; if a number surprises you, you can follow it back to what your child actually did.
Visibility is guardianship-scoped: you see your own learners and only your own learners. Teachers, likewise, see only their own class.
What you control — and the one thing you can't
Four controls belong to you. They shape how the tutor behaves with your child, and the tutor cannot override any of them.
Subjects & values
You choose what your child studies. And on contested topics, the tutor presents every credible perspective with its evidence and renders no verdict — it teaches your child how to weigh arguments, not what to conclude. Only approved content is ever served. What your family believes is decided at your table, not ours.
The gamification cap
The tutor celebrates progress with adjustable intensity — dialing up when celebration motivates your child and down when it distracts. Your cap is a hard ceiling the tutor can never exceed, and setting it to zero switches gamification off entirely. Games and celebrations never touch mastery scores or the gate; they decorate progress, they never define it.
Pathway invitations
When your child shows sustained strength at a specific skill — fluent arithmetic, say — the tutor may extend one gentle invitation to enrichment, such as competition math. An invitation is never a talent verdict and never has consequences: it cannot affect the gate, grades, or anything else, your child can dismiss it, and it is frequency-capped by design. You can cap invitations further, or disable them entirely.
Voice consent
Voice works only with your consent, and you can withdraw it whenever you wish. When enabled, the tutor uses voice sparingly — only where hearing or speaking genuinely helps, like an early reader facing text they can't yet decode. If the connection falters, the lesson simply continues in text.
The one thing you can't change
Before advanced subjects unlock, your child must genuinely master Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic — the Three R's. This mastery gate is immutable: no learner, parent, teacher, or administrator can lower or bypass it. Not even us.
Here is why that protects your child. Everything they will ever study rests on these three foundations, and gaps in them compound quietly for years. Every adult pressure — a deadline, a curriculum schedule, a well-meant "they're close enough" — pushes toward unlocking early. The gate exists so that no such pressure, including ours, can spend your child's foundations.
A locked subject is never a dead end. The answer is never "no" — it is "not yet, and here is the path": what's mastered, what remains, and the very next step. And the gate never blocks learning itself; your child keeps learning every day. Only the unlock of advanced subjects waits — and during the Private Preview, unlock decisions are deliberately conservative while independent expert calibration completes.
Reading the six metrics
Your child never sits a test to produce these numbers. Assessment runs continuously and invisibly inside the tutoring conversation itself — there is no quiz day, no test anxiety, no performing for the grader. Here is what each metric means when you're looking at the dashboard across the kitchen table.
Accuracy
Whether the answers are right.
At the kitchen tableRead it together with Reasoning. High accuracy with weak reasoning can mean memorizing without understanding — the tutor watches for exactly that pattern.
Fluency & speed
Not just right, but comfortable — how smoothly the skill flows.
At the kitchen tableSlow-but-correct is a stage, not a problem. Fluency arrives with practice, and this line lets you watch it arrive.
Reasoning
Can your child explain why? The quality of the thinking, not just the conclusion.
At the kitchen tableThe metric most worth celebrating out loud — it's the one that transfers to everything else your child will ever learn.
Struggle
The counterintuitive one. The tutor separates productive struggle — wrestling with something just out of reach, which is where learning happens — from unproductive struggle, spinning without traction.
At the kitchen tableA struggle reading is not a red flag; the tutor keeps some difficulty in on purpose. What matters is sustained unproductive struggle — and when that appears, the tutor is already easing the path.
Consistency
Does the skill hold up on an ordinary Tuesday evening, not just a good Saturday morning?
At the kitchen tableMastery that only shows up sometimes isn't mastery yet. Consistency is a large part of what makes the mastery gate trustworthy.
Retention
Quiet re-checks days or weeks later, woven invisibly into conversation — no announced revision tests.
At the kitchen tableThis is the difference between learned-for-Friday and learned-for-life. A dip here triggers review, which is normal and healthy — it's the system doing its job.
One promise holds across all six: every parent-facing number traces to real recorded events. Nothing on your dashboard is invented.
The grade estimate
For each learning track, LucaAIstein can estimate where your child stands against a named external standard — for reading, for example, CCSS and Lexile. Three things make this estimate honest:
- It is always a band, never a point. You'll see a range with its uncertainty — "reading in the grade 3–4 band" — not a falsely precise "3.62". Anyone who gives you a single decimal from tutoring data is overselling.
- It is always labeled for what it is: a tutor estimate, not a standardized test. It is built from everyday tutoring evidence, not administered under exam conditions, and it should never be treated as an official test result.
- It never influences the gate. Advanced subjects unlock on demonstrated mastery, never on the estimate.
Why it may say "unavailable" during the Private Preview
The estimate is shown only after an independent fairness review confirms it is equally trustworthy across different groups of learners. Until that review passes, it displays as unavailable — deliberately. We would rather show you nothing than a number we cannot stand behind for every child. It's the fail-closed principle again: honesty first, features second.
Privacy, consent, and erasure
Local-first, by architecture
The most personal material never leaves your device:
- Personal Library — books and documents you bring are stored only on your device. They serve as reference during lessons; they are never uploaded, and they never affect the mastery gate.
- Handwriting — a photo of written work is converted to text on the device itself; only the resulting scored work sample is kept. The image is never uploaded.
Our servers store scores and their provenance — not your child's raw content or images.
Consent you can trace and revoke
Every consent decision is recorded in an append-only ledger: what you granted, what you revoked, and when. You can revoke any consent — scoring, voice, handwriting — at any time, and the corresponding feature switches off for your child.
The right to erasure
LucaAIstein is designed for GDPR-style rights. On request, your child's personal data is purged, and their identifiers in the permanent audit log are cryptographically shredded — made irrecoverable, not merely hidden. To exercise this, email keith@gusit.de with the subject "Privacy request".
Who sees your child
You, and only you, see your own learners. Classroom visibility follows a FERPA-style boundary: a teacher sees their own class and never another's. There is no side door.
What to expect during the Private Preview
The Private Preview means we ship the honest version — with some features deliberately held back until they meet our bar. Here is exactly what that looks like:
- The monthly platform fee is on us. During the Private Preview the monthly platform fee is complimentary, and you pay only for the AI your child actually uses, billed monthly — the usage rates are on our pricing page.
- 50 customers. The Private Preview is invitation-based and limited to the first 50 customers. Once full, requests join the waitlist for general availability.
- English first. The tutor teaches in English during the Private Preview; more languages follow.
- Grade estimates and pathway invitations may show as unavailable until independent fairness reviews pass. That is fail-closed by design, not a bug.
- Advanced-subject unlocks are conservative while independent expert calibration completes. Learning is never blocked — only the unlock of advanced subjects waits.
- Voice is metered like everything else. Voice minutes are billed as part of your monthly usage, and the tutor uses voice only when it genuinely helps.
Support & sign-up
Keith handles sales and customer engagement, and he answers within one business day, EU & US business hours. Questions about your child's setup, consent, the dashboard, a number that surprises you — all welcome. For privacy or erasure requests, use the subject "Privacy request".
Join the Private Preview
Request your invitation with the sign-up wizard — or, if you prefer email, write to keith@gusit.de (cc gus@gusit.de), subject "LucaAIstein private preview", and tell us who will learn and how many learners.
The Private Preview is invitation-based and limited to the first 50 customers. The monthly platform fee is on us, and you pay only for what you use — see the pricing page for rates. Once full, requests join the waitlist for general availability.