Why I Built Lion City Scholar — It Started With My Boys
The idea for Lion City Scholar did not come from a business plan. It came from my kitchen table, watching my boys do their homework.Like many parents in Singapore, I sat with my sons after school, going through their test papers and workbook corrections. I would explain a maths concept, they would nod, and then two weeks later, the same mistake would appear again. Different question, same underlying gap.
It was frustrating — not because they were not trying, but because the system did not give them (or me) a good way to track what they actually struggled with and revisit it at the right time.
The Moment That Changed Everything
One evening, my older boy brought home a science paper. He had lost marks on a question about photosynthesis — the exact same topic he had gotten wrong a month earlier. When I showed him the earlier paper, he said, "I forgot I got this wrong before."
That sentence stuck with me.
He was not lazy. He was not careless. He simply had no system for remembering what he needed to work on. His mistakes lived on marked papers that got filed away and forgotten.
I thought: what if there was a tool that could remember every mistake, explain why the answer was wrong, and bring those gaps back at the right time so they actually stick?
Why AI Made It Possible
I have spent my career in technology, and I could see that AI had reached a point where it could genuinely understand a student's wrong answer — not just mark it right or wrong, but explain what went wrong in the student's thinking.
That is the key difference. A traditional app can tell you the correct answer is B. But AI can look at why you chose C and say, "You probably confused evaporation with condensation — here is how they are different."
For my boys, that kind of personalised feedback was exactly what was missing. Teachers do their best, but with 30 to 40 students in a class, they cannot give every child a detailed explanation for every mistake.
Building It for My Family First
I started building Lion City Scholar for my own sons. The first version was rough — just a way to photograph a wrong answer, get an AI explanation, and save it to a mistake log.
But even that simple version made a difference. My younger son started reviewing his past mistakes before tests. My older son liked that the AI explanations did not make him feel judged — it just explained things clearly, as many times as he needed.
From Family Project to Something Bigger
Other parents started asking about it. "Can my child use this?" "Does it work for Chinese?" "Can it handle PSLE maths?"
I realised that every parent sitting at that kitchen table, going through corrections, was facing the same problem we were. The gap was not effort or intelligence — it was that mistakes were being lost instead of learned from.
So I built Lion City Scholar into a proper platform:
- Photograph any wrong answer and get an instant AI explanation
- Track mistakes over time so patterns become visible
- Revisit gaps before exams with smart review
- Support the Singapore syllabus — PSLE, O-Level, and beyond
What I Want for Every Student
I did not build this to replace teachers or tuition. I built it because I believe every student deserves a patient, always-available learning companion that remembers what they struggle with and helps them get better.
My boys are still using it. They still make mistakes — that is part of learning. But now, those mistakes go somewhere useful instead of into a forgotten stack of papers.
If you are a parent in Singapore sitting at that same kitchen table, I built this for you and your child. Because every mistake is a chance to learn — if you have the right tool to capture it.