The AI tutor for elementary kids that never runs out of patience — and never makes up the answer.
The Scene
In a Brooklyn classroom, a first-grader leans into a tablet and reads a word aloud. The animated tutor on screen waits, then gently asks her to try the tricky vowel again. She does. It says yes. She grins like she just won something. Twenty feet away, another kid is doing subtraction with a different tutor, at a different pace, in the same five minutes.
No human staff could clone themselves fast enough to give every child in that room a private tutor at once. That is the ordinary miracle Super Teacher is quietly running - not in a demo, but on a random weekday, in public schools that could never before afford it. And the trick underneath it is stranger than the animation suggests: the tutor is built to always be right, on purpose.
The Origin
Tim Novikoff taught math in two very different New York City schools. First in Harlem. Then at Stuyvesant, one of the most selective public high schools in the country. The lessons were the same. The kids were not - not in ability, but in what they had waiting for them after the bell. At Stuyvesant, nearly every student had a private tutor. In Harlem, hardly any did.
You can teach for years and never shake a sentence like that. Novikoff didn't. He left the classroom, built a mobile video-editing app called Fly Labs, and sold it to Google in 2015. Inside Google he worked on AI for Google Photos and helped run Google Colab, the tool a generation of developers learned to code on. Useful work. But the Harlem-Stuyvesant gap was still sitting there, unclosed.
In 2022 he went back to it. Super Teacher is, in the plainest terms, his attempt to hand every kid the thing only some kids had - a tutor who shows up, one-on-one, every single day.
“It's really unfair that not everyone gets this opportunity.”
Tim Novikoff, Founder & CEOWhat It Actually Does
Kids don't type. They talk. Super Teacher's animated tutors have AI-generated voices and hold a back-and-forth conversation, the way a real tutor would - which matters most for the youngest learners, who can speak long before they can read a screen full of buttons.
Unlimited one-on-one tutoring in reading, math, art, poetry and science for ages 3–10. On iOS, Android and web. It adapts to each child's level in real time and never moves on until the concept lands.
The version districts deploy to every student at once, with teacher dashboards, lesson assignment and progress analytics. A full year per student can cost less than a single lesson at a tutoring agency.
Most AI education tools lean on large language models - which can invent facts. Super Teacher deliberately doesn't. Its content comes from a deterministic system designed to always give the correct answer.
Above: three products, one idea - reliability first, dazzle second.
The Contrarian Bet
In 2025, saying your product "uses AI" is roughly as distinctive as saying it uses electricity. Super Teacher's interesting claim is the opposite: it won't let a large language model generate answers for children. When you're teaching a seven-year-old that six times seven is forty-two, a tutor that is occasionally, confidently wrong isn't a quirk. It's a liability.
So the company made the unfashionable choice. The voice is AI. The animation is AI. But the actual teaching content runs on a deterministic engine - predictable, checkable, correct. It's a quieter kind of ambition than "chatbot for everything," and it happens to be the right one for kids still learning which facts are facts.
“Technology has risen to the point where it can really tutor - available 24/7, at a fraction of traditional tutoring cost.”
Greg Bagby, Ed-Tech Coordinator, Hamilton County SchoolsThe People
Former NYC math teacher (Harlem, then Stuyvesant). Founded Fly Labs, acquired by Google in 2015. At Google, worked on AI for Google Photos and helped run Google Colab. Started Super Teacher in 2022 to close the tutoring gap he watched firsthand.
Co-founded Super Teacher alongside Novikoff in New York. Part of the roughly 11-person team building an AI tutor for the age group most of edtech ignores - the earliest, and arguably most important, years of learning.
A small team, a narrow age band, and a stubborn idea: start where it matters most.
The Proof
“Their scores had actually shot up! Kids get tutoring every day, right in the classroom.”
Derek Minakami, Principal, Kāneʻohe Elementary School, Hawaii“It's tutoring. Unlike traditional tutoring, Super Teacher is ready for any child, at any time.”
Tracey Severns, Former Chief Academic Officer, NJ Dept. of EducationThe edtech graveyard is full of apps that entertained kids and taught them nothing. What separates Super Teacher is that its strongest reviews come not from a marketing deck but from principals watching test scores move - and from kids who ask to keep using it.
The Timeline
Novikoff's first startup, Fly Labs, is acquired by Google. He goes on to work on Google Photos AI and Google Colab.
Super Teacher Inc. is founded in New York by Tim Novikoff and Krzysztof Kulewski.
Raises a Seed round to build out the AI tutoring platform.
Named a Startup Battlefield Top 20 finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco; ~20,000 families signed up.
PS 101 The Verrazzano School in Brooklyn rolls Super Teacher out to students, joining deployments in NY, NJ and Hawaii.
Worth Knowing
Watch & Explore
Video interviews and demos live on Super Teacher's official channels - start with "How It Works."
The Scene, Revisited
The first-grader who argued with a cartoon about a vowel closes the tablet. She got it. So did the kid doing subtraction beside her, and the one across the room stuck on a poem. For that five minutes, every child in the room had a tutor of their own - the thing that used to sort kids by their parents' zip code and bank balance.
Super Teacher hasn't ended that sorting. Twenty thousand families and three states is a start, not a finish line. But the room is different now. The tutor showed up for everyone. That was always the whole idea.