A study companion designed for students
In Progress
2026
Four years of tutoring middle school and high school students taught me more about student behaviors than any lesson plan: students want to care about what they are learning, they just lack structure. In a world that provides quick answers, students no longer find studying meaningful. That is why they understand concepts , but struggle to apply them in exams. Student don't just need motivation. They need a tool that teaches them how to study. Hakmigo exists to close that specific gap — between understanding something and being able to use it under pressure.
Hakmigo is an agent disguised as a game that targets knowledge gaps and gaps in foundational tenets of critical thinking. Students learn and exercise their critical thinking skills via lessons and study sessions. Each session generates feedback about the student, their target areas and what critical thinking skills need to be strengthened. This information gets passed on to teachers with the goal of creating a better in class experience that supports each student.
Product is currently being tested. Outcomes are expected soon.
Post-COVID virtual learning created gaps that no current tool was addressing — study habits. Students lost independent study habits, which has resulted in a decline in critical thinking skills and many students, when faced with exams, more concerned about getting the answer right instead of acquiring the knowledge of how to get the right answer. For teachers, they gained more platforms and loss time.
Key Insight: Both teachers and students were overwhelmed by the volume of new tools. Tools that were meant to help in the classroom were now disrupting it.
After four years of tutoring, I kept noticing the same pattern: students who understood concepts in afterschool sometimes struggled to apply it on an exam. The problem was not always a gap in knowledge— it was the ability to put theory to practice.
This distinction gave way to Hakmigo, a study companion that tags along with the student in every study session. The companion offers students a personalized studying experience by encouraging them, being a bounce board to discuss ideas, tracking areas of weakness and adapting their learning journey to their needs. At the same time, the companion silently give teachers feedback on each student, quietly helping teachers create better curriculums.
Hakmigo is in beta and soon to be tested. After rounds of iteration, there is an MVP available.
Hakmigo was built with the help of Claude and shipped with React, Supabase, and Claude AI API. The MVP is live on Vercel and in testing.
A structured cohort testing is underway. After testing, it will be expanded beyond the initial scope to support independent students on-boarding across multiple subject.
When I began working on Hakmigo, there was tension between focusing on the details, getting the functionality just right, and testing it on time. The tension still exists, but less intensely so. Throughout this project, I have learned that creating a product is about working with those tensions and that at each phase you are pulled more in one direction than the other, but the direction or goal always remains the same. Hakmigo came from a desire to help my students by providing a tool that would empower them to take responsibility for their education, equipping them for a better, more successful future.
