Hello, friend. I’m Professor Singer, director of Tharaka Invention Academy. For many of the last few months, people have been asking when we will begin receiving students, how does the academy work? Where will the classes be held? Will I receive a certificate or diploma? Alright, let’s jump right in with answers for this one. We’re broadcasting from my home here in Kenya to look at an educational model that is flipping everything we thought we knew about school completely on its head. It’s a pretty amazing story about tech, ancient wisdom and how sometimes the most extreme limitations can actually spark the most incredible innovations. I mean, that sounds impossible, right? A school with basically nothing we’d consider essential striving to create top tier innovators. But here’s the thing, this isn’t just some thought experiment. We’re working to make it actually happen and it forces us to ask a really fundamental question: What is a school even for?
“`So to really get why this model is so revolutionary, we first have to understand the problem it’s solving, and it’s a big one, a classroom crisis that honestly goes back generations. The great educator, Paulo Frere, called this the banking model. And uh, it’s a perfect description, isn’t it? The idea is that students are just these empty accounts and the teacher’s job is to deposit facts into their heads. Then on test day, the student makes a withdrawal. It’s totally passive and it’s a terrible way to teach someone how to actually think for themselves or you know, create something new. And this right here just lays it all out. We need to get away from this old model that’s all about compliance and just memorizing stuff. The goal needs to be about building agency, about sparking real creativity. You don’t wanna just be a passive bucket for information. You wanna be an active inquirer who can go out and actually solve problems.
So how do you even begin to break a system that’s been around for more than a hundred years? Well, you don’t just tweak it. You have to build something totally new from the ground up. And that’s precisely what our group here in Kenya decided to do. And welcome to Thika Invention Academy or TIA. Now look at these design parameters. They are wild, but here’s the brilliant part. Instead of seeing these as huge problems, they embrace them as design principles. No classrooms? Cool learning can happen anywhere. No full-time teachers? Okay, we’ll invent a new kind of mentor. Spotty internet? Fine. Sometimes the whole system has to still work offline. This is innovation born out of pure necessity.
So what’s our big solution? It’s called AI mediated cognitive apprenticeship. Yeah, it’s a bit of a mouthful, I know, but the idea is actually pretty simple. We built an AI to be an expert mentor. And listen, this isn’t about giving a busy teacher a little bit of help. This is about creating a mentor from scratch in a place where one just doesn’t exist. Now I know what you’re thinking. An AI mentor, it sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, but it’s very, very real. So how in the world does an AI actually teach a student how to invent something? Let’s look under the surface and take a look. So the entire system is built on this really cool learning theory. Think about it like this. If you wanna learn carpentry, you can watch a master carpenter work, right? You can see what they’re doing. But with something like innovation, the most important work, how an expert frames a problem, how they brainstorm, how they deal with failure, all of that is invisible. It happens inside their head. The AI’s job is to take that invisible process and make it visible.
And TIA does this with a whole set of AI tools. You’ve got your main innovation coach and then this team of specialized problem pals. The key is they don’t just give you the answers, no way. They act more like a cognitive mirror. They prompt you with the exact kinds of questions an expert inventor would be asking themselves. They’re essentially broadcasting an expert’s internal monologue right out into the open in this whole ecosystem. There are 156 of these AI agents, which are organized into these things called cognitive clusters. So you’ve got problem pals that will help you brainstorm, some that help you analyze risk, and you even have some that are there to give you emotional support. When an idea falls flat, each one is designed to help with a very specific part of the invention process.
Okay? Here’s a perfect example of how it works. In practice, the TRIZ contradiction coach, it never gives you a solution. Instead, it forces you to define the perfect outcome then to pinpoint exactly what’s stopping you. And then it walks you through expert level strategies to think your way around that roadblock. It’s a guided thinking process, not an answer machine. It’s brilliant. But here’s the thing, if you think this is just a story about some really clever technology you are missing the most important part. The mission behind TIA is so much deeper. It is rooted in philosophy, in culture, and in history. This whole thing is about reversing generations of damage. That colonial banking model of education taught generations of students to just passively accept knowledge, not to create it. TIA is explicitly designed to restore their agency, to give back their fundamental right to solve their own problems and invent their own futures to, as I would say, name their world.
And the entire AI system, its entire ethical framework, is built on the powerful African philosophies of Ubuntu, Maat and ancestral knowledge. Now, you might have heard Ubuntu translated as “I am because we are,” but it’s so much deeper than that. It’s an entire worldview, a framework for thinking that connects every single action to the community, to ancestors, and to the generations that are yet to come. And this, this is one of the guiding questions from the TIA textbook that the AI will actually prompt students with. Just think about that for a second. How different is that from the typical startup question of what’s the total addressable market? It embeds this profound ethical compass right into the heart of creation. And this isn’t just some vague high level idea, it’s literally hard coded into the AI agents. You have tools like the ethical Risk Scanner, or a proverb mentor that uses traditional wisdom to help you reframe problems. This is what a decolonial AI actually looks like. Technology that’s built not on some generic one size fits all model, but on local indigenous values.
So why does a small academy in rural Kenya matter to the rest of the world? ‘Cause what’s happening here offers a powerful and I think, hopeful new vision for the future of education everywhere. It all comes down to this one number: zero. In Thika, the number of teachers who specialize in teaching innovation is for all practical purposes, zero. This isn’t just a teacher shortage, it’s a complete and total absence. TIA was built for what’s called a zero ratio context. And that right there is the most important paradigm shift in this whole story. You see, in most of the developed world, we’re all talking about AI as a supplement, a tool to help teachers. TIA proves that in places with nothing, AI can be a substitute. It can perform the core essential mentoring functions of a teacher using the student’s language who simply doesn’t exist and probably never will.
So the biggest takeaway here is this. TIA is not about replacing human teachers with robots. It’s about using technology to scale the wisdom of a great mentor and extend it to places and to people that could never ever reach before. It’s a model where AI serves not just efficiency, but human dignity, sovereignty and liberation. And that kind of leaves us with one last big thought to chew on right now. We are all obsessed with AI’s ability to give us faster and faster answers, but maybe just maybe Thika Invention Academy is showing the world a much more profound purpose. That AI’s greatest gift isn’t giving us answers, but teaching us how to ask the questions that truly matter.
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