Built by a Father & Daughter Team
WordRunner started the way most good ideas do — with a problem no one expected. My daughter came home needing to prepare for a test on vocabulary, grammar, and figurative language. I wanted to help. The problem? As a native speaker, I didn't actually know the formal rules.
I write fluently — but I have no formal grammar training. I couldn't explain morphology, distinguish inflectional from derivational forms, or name the syntax rules I use daily. Blind spots I'd never needed to fill — until now.
Her tests demand far more than everyday fluency: writing sentences that follow formal grammar rules, spotting errors and explaining which rule is broken, and analysing figurative language in context. Demanding, knowledge-heavy tasks — and I found the technicality uninteresting to master myself. But I'm fascinated by AI, and I realised that was our way in.
So we turned to AI. We asked Google's Gemini to generate practice sentences — "fill in the missing word" exercises matching her test format — and to grade her written answers against the formal rules. It worked remarkably well. The idea grew: what if any student, parent, or teacher could use this?
With zero coding experience, we used AI tools — Google's Antigravity, Gemini Pro, and Anthropic's Claude — to build WordRunner from scratch. The result? Higher test scores, real understanding of language structure, and a system we couldn't keep to ourselves.
"It wasn't that traditional methods weren't working — it was that I couldn't fully employ them. I didn't have the knowledge to help my daughter as much as she needed. AI changed that, and WordRunner is the result."
We're a tiny team — a father and daughter in Switzerland — building something we believe in. We don't have a marketing department or a board of investors. We have a working app, a first pilot about to begin, and the hope that it helps. If you're a teacher, a parent, a student, or just someone who cares about how children learn — we'd genuinely welcome your feedback. We're building this in the open because we think that's the right way to do it.