A free educational bot by Caleb Clark. Private. No log-in. No cost.
"If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself." — attributed to Albert Einstein
NoNothinBot reveals understanding through teaching: students explain a concept to a curious novice, answer its questions, and then generate a shareable session report for formative assessment. The report replaces the test — test the bot, not the student.
Grounded in established pedagogy: the Feynman Technique, the protégé effect, learning by teaching, the Socratic method, and dual coding theory (via the bot's simple SVG drawings of what it thinks it's learning). Full teacher, parent, and guardian guide with lesson plan, rubric, and peer-reviewed citations.
CONTACT: caleb@showwhatyouknow.org · LinkedIn · Sponsor on GitHub · Donate on Patreon
ABOUT: Hi. I'm Caleb Clark and I hate tests, so I made this free bot to help people show what they know by teaching, not testing. I've worked as an educational technologist (LinkedIn Bio) since the mid-1990s, and I'm currently at a public school in Vermont, USA. I've been fighting the good fight for years, making technology that helps humans, and trying to make this bot for years, too, and it finally clicked with AI to help me code.
GEEK OUT: Four files. index.html with embedded CSS/JS, two Vercel serverless functions — one hitting the Claude API (Sonnet), one reading counters from Upstash Redis — and a vercel.json. GitHub hosts the repo, Vercel auto-deploys on push. Cloudflare handles DNS and email routing. No frameworks, no build step, no login, no database beyond a key-value store. Total dependencies: zero. AKA it doesn't rely on any external code libraries or packages.
I made this to be used easily, so no accounts, logins, cookies, tracking, or storing conversations. When a session ends, it's gone from the servers I use on Vercel.com and Github. Conversations are processed by Claude with an API and tokens I pay for. Anthropic's AI may retain data briefly per their safety policies. No student names or personal information are collected. I used Claude because I like their guardrails the most of any AI. - Caleb