Ethel

A tutor that costs you nothing to keep using.

Ethel teaches you a topic, then checks that you actually understood it. She runs entirely on your own phone or laptop — so she works with no signal, in a village or a lecture hall, and she never eats a data bundle.

Get Ethel Where she came from

Free for students. 251 courses: Grades 8 to 12, practical skills, and degree courses at UNZA and Kwame Nkrumah University in this beta. Android 7 and up, or any laptop.

Principles of Accounts · Grade 10

A business buys a delivery bicycle for K1200 cash. What happens to total assets?

  1. A They rise by K1200 Your answer ×
  2. B They rise by K2400
  3. C They fall by K1200
  4. D They are unchanged

One asset (the bicycle) rose by K1200 and another (cash) fell by K1200. The total is unchanged; only the form the assets take has changed.

Answered wrongly on purpose. That is Ethel’s actual reply, taken from the app — no internet involved.

She teaches. She does not just quiz you.

Most study apps hand you questions and a score. Ethel walks you through the idea first, in pieces, and stops after each piece to check you are still with her.

  • No data bundle, ever

    Everything is inside the app already. Once she is on your phone, no lesson, no question and no answer costs you a single ngwee of airtime.

  • Works where there is no network

    No signal at home, load-shedding, a campus with one weak bar of 3G — none of it matters. She has never needed a connection to teach.

  • Get it wrong and she explains why

    Pick a wrong answer and she tells you why it was wrong, not just what was right. Where it is a slip students often make, she explains that particular mistake and gives you another go.

  • Starts where you actually are

    The placement test adapts as you go: right answers pull harder questions, wrong ones step back. You are not dropped into Grade 12 material you have not met yet.

  • Your courses, by name

    Pick school, college or university, then your programme and year. She lists the courses she can teach — and where she has no material, she says so by name instead of pretending.

  • Lecturers: bring your own notes

    Load your own handouts and past papers and she teaches from yours, citing your material rather than something generic off the internet.

It started as a thought in 2024.

The idea for Ethel arrived in 2024, and for a long time that is all it was — an idea I kept turning over. A tutor that any student could have, that did not need money every month, did not need a strong signal, and did not need a bundle you had to choose between buying and eating lunch.

That last part is the whole reason she exists. Plenty of good learning tools are already out there. Almost all of them assume you are online and that staying online is cheap. For a lot of students here, neither is true. So the tool that would help you most is the one you can least afford to keep running, and you end up back with a borrowed textbook and whatever you can remember from the lecture.

I wanted something a student could be handed once, and then own — working the same on the last day of the month as on the first.

Building it took the idea apart. A tutor that cannot reach the internet cannot look anything up, which means everything it teaches has to be carried with it and checked before it ships. That turned out to be the right constraint rather than a limitation: it forced her to be honest. Ethel will tell you when a course has no material behind it. She will say she does not know rather than invent something plausible, because there is nowhere for her to quietly go and guess.

She is named Ethel because this was never meant to feel like software you operate. It should feel like sitting next to somebody patient who has done this before, who does not sigh when you ask the same question twice, and who would rather you understood the thing than finished the exercise.

What you can download here is the first build to leave my machine. It is rough in places and I would rather you saw it now and told me what is wrong with it than waited another year for something polished.

Everything I have built, in one place.

Download them here. When I ship an update it appears on this page — come back and pull the newest one.

Ethel

Beta

An offline tutor for Zambian secondary, college and university learners. Android phone, tablet, or laptop.