Mwalimu wa Mathe
A NECTA maths tutor for Tanzanian Form 4 students that lives on WhatsApp: send a question, get a step-by-step solution in Swahili with an animation that draws the working out.
A Form 4 student stuck on a NECTA past paper at 9pm has few good options. Textbook answers give the final number and skip the reasoning. YouTube explanations are in English, aimed at a different syllabus. Private tuition costs money most families do not have spare. And the maths itself is taught in a language that is not the one the student thinks in.
Meet students where they already are. Almost every Tanzanian student with a phone has WhatsApp and a data bundle to match, so WhatsApp is the front door: send a question as text or a photo of a past paper, get an answer back in the same thread. The web app is the second door for anyone who wants a bigger screen. Every solution comes back numbered, in Swahili, with a short animation that draws the working out rather than just stating it, and any step can be queried again by replying with its number.
Maths in Tanzania is taught in English to students who reason in Swahili. The subject is hard enough without the translation tax on top of it.
I wanted the explanation to arrive in the language a student actually thinks in, drawn out step by step, at the hour they are actually revising, for the price of a WhatsApp message.
WhatsApp first
Ask in the thread you already have open. No install, no signup, no new password to forget.
Numbered steps
Every solution is broken into numbered steps in Swahili, so a student can point at the exact one that lost them.
Drawn, not stated
A Manim animation renders the working out: triangles get labelled, curves get plotted, algebra reveals line by line.
"Sijaelewa hatua ya 2"
Reply with a step number and that step gets re-explained in simpler Swahili, as many times as it takes.
NECTA paper upload
Upload a past paper and pull questions straight out of it instead of retyping them.
Swahili voice
Narration uses native Tanzanian voices, so the animation is heard as well as read.
The reliability idea at the centre of the system is a constraint: the model never writes animation code. Claude reads the question and emits a typed JSON solution plan, a list of numbered steps where each step picks one of thirteen hand-written animation templates and fills in its parameters. The worker validates those parameters, renders the scene with Manim, stitches the steps into one video with step timestamps, and adds Swahili narration.
That split is what makes it safe to run unattended. Generated code could fail in unbounded ways; generated parameters can only fail in ways the schema already describes, and a failed step retries or degrades to a static frame. The written solution is always returned, so the video is a bonus rather than a dependency.
WhatsApp as the product, not a notification channel. The whole loop (ask, answer, re-ask a step) happens in the thread. The web app mirrors it rather than owning it.
Typed plans over generated code. Claude fills in a schema; hand-written Manim templates do the drawing. Failures are bounded, testable and cheap to retry.
Render off the request path. The API enqueues, a separate worker renders. A slow animation never blocks an answer, and the text solution ships immediately.
Swahili as the default, not a translation. Steps, narration and the on-screen labels are written in Swahili first, with a glossary keeping the maths vocabulary consistent between them.
Building this sent me down a legal rabbit hole about what a software founder in Tanzania can actually protect, and what a COSOTA registration really covers. I wrote it up: Everyone says "patent it." In Tanzania, it's complicated.
Uliza swali la hisabati.
Send a NECTA question and get the working out, step by step, in Swahili.