Create joy in learning
Umeed is an AI-native, play-based social and emotional learning platform for children and their caregivers, built on cognitive behavioral therapy. Because play and CBT work.
What Umeed actually is
A child aged 5 to 11 plays a short game. While they play, they learn one cognitive behavioral technique and practise it. Their grown-ups get a report on what their emotional learning is doing, and a companion they can ask anything.
For the child
Ten islands, each one a feeling. A story, a character, and a technique they practise until it holds. It plays like a game because that is how children of this age learn.
For the grown-ups
A report on their child's emotional learning progress after every session, and an AI companion for the questions that come next.
For the school
A picture of emotional health across classes and year groups, built from the same sessions, with nothing re-entered by hand.
Umeed is a learning platform, not therapy, and it does not stand in for a counselor. Every scenario, feeling word and technique is reviewed by a licensed CBT clinician before a child sees it.
What happened when we measured it
A difference-in-differences study, comparing classes using Umeed against classes that were not.
That is a quasi-experimental design, not a randomized controlled trial, and we would rather say so than round it up. A full randomized trial is our next milestone. If you are evaluating platforms for a school or a trust, we will send you the study rather than a summary of it.
The reason we build on play and on cognitive behavioral therapy is not a house preference. CBT is among the most evidence-backed approaches to emotional regulation in children, and play is how a five to eleven year old actually rehearses a skill rather than merely hearing about it. Umeed puts the two together on purpose.
Ten islands, ten feelings
Each island takes one hard feeling and teaches the cognitive behavioral technique that works on it. The map is drawn from the cognitive distortions described in David Burns's cognitive therapy work, translated into stories a seven year old can play.
Live now
Rejection Island — being left out, and the jump from an event to "nobody wants me". Teaches attribution reframing.
Lonely Island — being on your own, and the difference between alone and lonely.
Next
Worry Island, Anger Island, Fear Island — the three feelings teachers, clinicians and parents ask us about most, and the ones that most often end a lesson early.
Then
Self-Esteem Island, Sadness Island, Guilt Island, Comparison Island, Mistake Island — the quieter feelings, which are usually the ones nobody reports.
Children see the whole map from the first day, including the islands that are not built yet. Knowing there is a journey ahead is part of what keeps a child coming back to it.
English, Urdu and Arabic. Each language reviewed by someone who teaches in it, because a translated emotion vocabulary is usually subtly wrong.
One loop, one child, and it stays here
Umeed is AI-native, which means the platform learns what a particular child finds hard and builds towards it. That only works if the loop is closed, and ours is.
The loop is the child's own
What a child does in a game shapes what Umeed offers that child next — which island, which difficulty, which practice. That loop exists for one child and does not leave them.
It never trains a model
Journal entries, answers and session records are never added to a training set, ours or a vendor's. They are used to write that child's report and to shape that child's next game. Nothing else.
It reaches adults by consent
What the child does goes to their parent. It reaches a teacher or a school only where the parent has agreed to it. It goes nowhere else, and it is never sold or shared with advertisers.
Substance is approved, not invented
Every feeling word, thought, technique and exercise comes from a library a licensed CBT clinician signed off. The model writes the sentences that join them together. It cannot invent a therapeutic instruction, because it is never asked to.
The model never talks to a child
Children only ever see authored, reviewed text inside the game. There is no open-ended conversation between a child and a model anywhere in Umeed.
Generated games are reviewed before play
New games are built with AI against the approved library and the same method every other game uses, and every one is reviewed by a person before a child can reach it. Nothing generates straight into a child's hands.
The same loop is what lets the companion help an adult usefully. It answers about this child, from that child's own record, rather than offering generic advice about children in general.
A disclosure of harm is the one thing that never reaches a model at all. It is caught before generation and answered with fixed text that points an adult at their safeguarding route, because that moment needs a person and not a paraphrase.
Parents, teachers, clinicians, school leaders
The child's sessions are the same. What the platform gives each adult is not.
Parents
Their child's emotional learning progress — a report after each session: what they chose, what they found hard, and what their journal shows if they chose to share it.
How to handle the difficult moments — ask the companion what to do about the meltdown, the shutdown, the refusal. It answers about your child.
Support with your own feelings — the guilt, the frustration, the dread. Parenting is emotional work and the companion treats it as such.
Something to do together — a short activity after each session, usually four minutes and no materials.
Teachers
Every child's progress, in one place — who is moving, who has stalled, who is worth a closer look this week.
What to do today — a short class activity each day, built from your own results, not from a generic scheme of work.
How to handle it in the room — ask the companion about a child, a moment, or a conversation with a parent.
Support with the job — losing patience, dreading a meeting, feeling useless after a hard day. The companion answers that too.
Clinicians
Your patients, not a classroom — you assign an island to a child, they play it between appointments, and what they wrote is waiting for you at the next one.
The child's own words — the journal as they typed it, not a score. It is material for the session, not a result to act on.
One technique, carried between sessions — the island teaches a single CBT technique and the portal shows whether it held a fortnight later.
Umeed is not treatment — it is structured practice between your sessions. The clinical judgement stays with you, and a disclosure of harm is routed to you and never answered by a model.
School leaders
A picture of emotional health across the school — how year groups and classes are doing, drawn from the same sessions with nothing re-keyed.
Where to put your attention — which classes need support, and what is actually changing over a term.
Something to show a board — evidence of provision and of movement, in a form you can export.
Every sentence in a report is assembled from that child's session record and a library a person approved. The companion writes the joins. It does not invent a feeling word, a thought, an exercise or a number, and each report shows the identifiers it used.
It gives a family something to do together
The part parents tell us about is not the report. It is the four minutes afterwards.
A child finishes a session and there is something specific to talk about — not "how was your day", which gets "fine", but a particular feeling with a name, in a story you both now know. The activity that comes with each report is built for a parent and a child to do together, and most of them are a conversation rather than a worksheet.
Children of this age rarely have the words for what happened at school. Umeed gives them the words, and gives the grown-up somewhere to start.
The less we hold, the less there is to lose
A children's product should be judged on what it refuses to collect, not on the length of its policy. Here is what Umeed actually does.
Children have no accounts
No name required to play, no email, no password, no profile. A child receives a short play code and that code is the whole login. The code is generated by their own parent or their teacher — never by us, and never by the child.
The journal belongs to the child
If a child marks a journal entry private, the words stay with the child. No adult sees them, and neither does the companion that writes the report.
The companion on this site is not signed in
It cannot see any child. It does not know who you are, nothing you type is stored against a name, and the conversation is not kept after you close the tab.
A session record is small on purpose
Which options a child chose, their mood before and after, and their journal if they shared it. No location, no device fingerprint, no browsing history, no photographs, no voice.
Sharing is the parent's decision
A child's record reaches a teacher or a school because a parent agreed to it. Access is then decided by database rules, not by a setting someone could forget. A teacher sees her class. Nobody sees another school.
No advertising, ever
We do not sell data, we do not share it with advertisers, and there are no third party trackers in the product.
We work to COPPA in the United States, to GDPR and the UK children's code where they apply, and to the data rules of the ministries we work with. If a school needs a data processing agreement, we sign one.
The six points above are the summary. The full policy is one page and covers all of it in detail, including exactly what the AI is given and what it is never given.
Full privacy and child safety policy What the AI is given Child safety
To ask what we hold about a child, or to have it deleted, write to us and we will do it. You do not need a reason and you do not need a lawyer.
Tested where it is hardest to make anything work
Forty children in a room, one shared device, a teacher with half a day of training. We built it under those conditions because a platform that holds up there holds up anywhere.
Our team and advisory board come from Teachers College, NYU Tisch, Sesame Workshop, Amazon, the World Bank, Georgetown and the LEGO Foundation — people who have built for children, measured outcomes for institutions, or both.
Clinical content is reviewed by a licensed CBT clinician before it reaches a child. Nothing therapeutic goes live on an engineer's judgement.
The things people ask first
What age is Umeed for?
Children aged 5 to 11. The reading level and the difficulty change across that range; the method does not.
Is this therapy?
No. Umeed is a learning platform built on cognitive behavioral therapy, in the way a language app is built on linguistics. It teaches techniques. It does not treat anyone, it does not diagnose, and it does not replace a counselor.
How long does a session take?
A child plays for about ten to fifteen minutes. The adult's part is about a minute to start it, and four minutes afterwards if they want to do the activity.
Do children talk to an AI?
No. Everything a child sees in a game is authored and reviewed before they see it. The companion is for adults only.
Is my child's data used to train AI?
No. Not by us and not by any vendor. It is used to write that child's report and to shape that child's next game, and for nothing else.
Who can see what my child writes?
You, if they chose to share it. A teacher or school only if you agreed to that. If your child marks a journal entry private, nobody sees it at all.
What is the difference between an invite code and a play code?
An invite code is for a grown-up, to create an account while Umeed is invite-only. A play code is what a child types to start a game — you generate it for them once you have added them to your account.
What do I need to run this in a classroom?
A browser. That is all. It runs on whatever the school already has, including shared devices.
How do I get an invite code?
Ask us. Parents, teachers, clinicians and schools are all welcome — leave your email on the contact page and we will send one.
Three ways in, depending on who you are
Adults sign in. Children never do — they get a play code when it is time to play.
Parents
Add your children, get their play codes, and see a report on their emotional learning after every session — plus something short to do together.
Start freeTeachers
Add your class in one pass, print the play codes, and get a class activity each day built from your own results. Designed for a teacher who has no spare hour.
Start freeSchools
Many classes, a view of emotional health across the school, and exports for your board.
Talk to us