The problem worth solving
Parents of school-age kids don't need another entertainment app — they need the nightly character practice to stop being a battle. The gap in the market was precision: an app aligned to what the child is actually assigned, grade by grade, that a six-year-old genuinely wants to open.
The craft decisions
- The curriculum is the spine. All 1,944 characters are organized by the real grade 1–6 progression, so a second-grader practices second-grade characters — not a random "most common" list.
- Stroke order taught properly. Writing practice is stroke-by-stroke with the correct order enforced, because that's how school grades it and how the hand actually learns.
- Games that make characters stick. Reading and recognition are drilled through play — every game rewards the character knowledge, not just tapping.
- Traditional and Simplified as equals. Families in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland diaspora don't all use the same script; CharGem treats both as first-class.
What shipped
CharGem is live on the web today, with the full character set, writing practice, and games — built by hand, tested on real kids in the family, and refined until they asked to keep playing. The native mobile app is in the works.
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