The questions parents and tutors actually ask.

A place where kids aged 10–13 turn their own ideas into working builds — games, websites, quizzes and on-screen gadgets — with an AI helper, Pip, that helps them build things but refuses to think for them.

No. Ask it for an essay, a homework answer or last night's score and Pip says the same thing every time: “That's not something I can help build. Want to make a game, a quiz, or a tool that solves a real problem instead?” There is no blank chat box to wander off in — the only conversation is about the build on the screen. The guardrails page walks through all of it.

The route from idea to program. First the child writes a plan in numbered steps, in their own words. The steps become blocks — the whole program on one screen, where swapping two blocks shows immediately what breaks. Code is the final notation for logic they already understand. The thinking happens before the code, and that order is the point — how it works shows each stage.

Three kinds of making, all in the browser. 25 gadget kits on an on-screen Raspberry Pi — real Python driving lamps, chimes, thermometers and cameras, with nothing to buy. 30 challenges, each with a brief and honest marking. And 18 short Learn missions across three tracks: asking for exactly what you want, chopping big builds into small pieces, and checking that what came back is what you meant.

No. A child signs in with a username and a password, and the account holds their first name and nothing else about them — there is nowhere in the product to enter a child's email address or phone number. The grown-up who made the login chooses the password and can set a new one at any time; nobody can read the old one back, not even us.

Nothing. A family account is free and holds up to three child logins, and there is no card anywhere in the product. Children at home are not “seats”. If you find yourself running more than three, that is a class — the next section is for you, and pricing has the numbers.

Two ways, and you can mix them. The quick one: paste your register into a class and print the password sheet — usernames and readable passwords for the whole group, in minutes. The other: send parents your class's invitation link so they fill in the consent form first. Either way, you hand each child a username and a password on paper, and no student email address exists at any point.

Every class has an invitation link you can send to parents. It opens a short form: the parent's name and email as the who-said-yes record, the child's first name, and the parent's choice about public pages. The form never creates an account — it puts a pending row in front of you, and only you can turn that row into a login and hand the password out in class. A form from a name you don't recognise gets discarded, and nothing happens.

A seat is a student sitting in one of your active classes. The bands are $12 a month for 10 seats, $29 for 30 and $79 for 100 — and every band is free while the pilot runs. Billing is not connected and nobody has ever been charged; when that changes we will say so first, and nothing will start silently.

Archive the class. The seats come back for your next group, and nothing anybody made is deleted — every build and every mark stays, and you can re-open the class whenever you want to look back at it.

Strictly, and with evidence. Checks that can be settled by our own code run first — facts about the files that cannot be argued with or flattered. Then the AI grades the rest, and every tick it awards must quote the line of the child's own code that earns it. We verify the quote really is in the files; a tick without one is struck out. No quote, no tick.

After the code is read, Pip asks the child two questions about decisions — why they chose what they chose, what they tried that didn't work — not about lines. A child who had the AI write everything can read code back as well as anyone; what they cannot do is describe the decisions. Their typed answers are marked under the same evidence rules as the code.

“Not yet” — never “failed”. The feedback says what was found and what is missing, in words a ten-year-old can act on, and the child can fix the build and hand it in again as many times as it takes. Handing in again simply puts the work back in front of the marking.

Pip runs on an outside AI service, called from our own server. What goes to it: the conversation, the code of the build being worked on, and — for marking — the child's typed answers. What never goes: the child's name, username, email, or anything that says who wrote it. And because every request is made by our server rather than the child's device, the service never sees the child's device or network address either. From its side, each request is code and words from an anonymous account of ours. The privacy page spells this out.

No, because the machinery does not exist. There is no feed, no chat between users, no comments, no direct messages and no way for anyone — adult or child — to reach anyone else inside Piplab. There are also no ads and no trackers on the site. The only email Piplab sends goes to grown-ups about their own account — a welcome, a password reset, a security notice. A child has no email address here at all, so there is no inbox of theirs for anything to arrive in — and the parent consent form is a record of who said yes, not a mailing list.

No. Before a single line of a child's program runs, the sandbox deletes its own network functions — fetch, sockets and the rest are removed, not switched off, so a program cannot open a connection because the ways of opening one are not there. That is a property of how it is built, not a setting somebody has to remember to tick.

The grown-up who made the login, and public pages start switched off on every one. For a class student the tutor holds a per-student switch on the register; for a child at home the parent holds the same switch on the account page. The check runs every time a public page is opened — so switching it off takes any already-published pages off the web as well — and a public page shows a playful made-up handle, never a surname.