For parents of 5th–11th graders
Your child gets stuck. Rika gently nudges with questions and hints, but never gives the answer. The thinking stays with them.
Free on the App Store. Requires iPad and Apple Pencil.
The worksheet is on the kitchen table. Your child has been staring at problem 3 for ten minutes. You try to help, but you learned this differently, or you’ve forgotten it entirely. The frustration builds. The tears start. You think about a tutor: $80 an hour, can’t come till Thursday.
So tonight, you push through. But tomorrow, it happens again.
Tonight without Rika
Your child Googles the answer. Or copies from a solver app. Or guesses and moves on. The worksheet gets turned in. Nothing was understood. The gap keeps growing.
Tonight with Rika
Snap the worksheet. Each problem becomes a page in a digital notebook. Your child solves with their Apple Pencil, by hand, the way they would on paper. When they get stuck, Rika nudges them forward with a thought-provoking hint, never the answer. By 8:45, the homework is done. Actually done. Understood.
From paper worksheet to graded, understood homework in four steps.
Photograph the homework with the iPad camera or AirDrop it from your phone. Rika reads every question and turns it into a digital notebook, one page per problem.
Your child works through each problem with their Apple Pencil. Real handwriting. Real thinking. No multiple choice. No typing. No way to fake it.
When they get stuck, Rika nudges instead of telling. “What if you isolated x first?” The thinking stays with your child.
Every problem is graded with step-by-step feedback. One tap emails the homework as a PDF: handwritten solutions, scores, and a short report the teacher actually wants to read.
What Rika does
The science
Most parents assume their child is struggling with the current chapter. Rika usually finds something else: a gap from years ago that’s been quietly compounding.
Your child isn’t bad at algebra. The fraction skill from 4th grade has a crack, and every concept built on top of it is unstable.
skills mapped. Rika finds the one with the crack.
Every time your child solves a problem, Rika learns more about how they think — not just whether they got it right.
Not just overall. By concept, by difficulty, over time. Scoring 80% on easy problems is very different from 80% on hard ones.
Speed, erasing, restarts. A correct answer reached through struggle is not the same skill as one written fluidly. Rika reads both.
Rika tracks how quickly each skill fades and schedules a review at exactly the right moment — before your child forgets.
Careless slips and conceptual confusion are different problems. A child who catches their own mistakes needs different help than one who doesn’t.
A right answer reached through hesitation means something different than one written fluidly. A wrong answer written confidently means something else again.
Weekly trends, breakthroughs, and early warning signs. You’ll know when your child is improving — and when something needs attention.
The teacher report
When your child emails their Rika homework, the teacher doesn’t just get answers. They get handwritten solutions, step-by-step scores, and a narrative on what was understood and where the gaps are. After two weeks, the teacher has more insight than any standardized test will ever produce.
Problems 3 and 7 involved fraction-to-decimal conversion. Difficulty traces to an incomplete understanding of equivalent fractions from Grade 4.
Variable isolation, equation balancing, and two-step equations are solid. Fluency improved 22% over two weeks.
A note from the founder
I built Rika because I watched my own kid stare at a math worksheet and quietly give up. I tried every app on the App Store. They either gave away the answer or felt like a slot machine of badges. Nothing watched my kid’s actual thinking, and nothing required them to do the actual work.
Rika is the tool I wished existed at 8pm on a Tuesday. If you’re reading this, I think you’ll know exactly what I mean.
No. Unlike some apps that provide a step by step way to solve math problems, Rika assists your child to solve the problem themselves. Through useful hints and thought-provoking questions, Rika guides the students to work through the math problems.
Grades 5 through 11. Rika maps 412 math skills across that range, aligned to 50 state curriculums. If your child has a gap from an earlier grade, Rika will find it.
No. Up to three children can share one iPad. Each gets their own profile, their own progress, and their own math portrait, kept completely separate.
Never. Rika escalates from a gentle orienting question to a more specific nudge, but it never reveals the answer. Your child has to do the thinking. That’s the point.
No. Rika is free to use. We are working on a paid version that will feature:
Rika helps with the math homework the same way a parent or a tutor might, while being free to use and inducing the child to actually solve the problems themself. Rika emails a weekly report to you laying out the math-related skills and cognitive development trends based on your child’s efforts on their math using the app.
Rika is free on iPad. Download it, snap the first worksheet, and watch what happens.
Download on the App StoreFree. Requires iPad and Apple Pencil. We never sell your child’s data.