The Field Stack
The AI-powered tools the cohort builds in the August workshop and carries to the field. Most run offline. Each one is honest about what’s real and what’s a demo.
Every student ships two working apps of their own — one that runs the school (power, water, connectivity), and one they imagine themselves for the mission: food, water, education, empowerment, or healthcare.
Workshop toolkit
- Claude Code — the build partner. Required. Download
- Claude desktop app — chat, screenshots, thinking out loud. Download
- Cursor — the AI code editor. Download · one month of Pro free (sign up through this link and Pro applies automatically).
- Wispr Flow — speak your prompts instead of typing them. Download
Beginner · Water
Is it safe to drink?
Starter brief — copy into your vision.md, then edit it
What it does: I type in water test-strip readings (turbidity, pH, TDS); it judges each against WHO limits, shows a loud UNSAFE banner naming the failing reading, and keeps a history. Who uses it: whoever runs the day's water test at the site. Must never: call unsafe water safe, or lose logged readings on refresh. Done when: a bad reading triggers the banner, the history grows, and three break-it tests pass.
Intermediate · Education
Teach the kids
Starter brief — copy into your vision.md, then edit it
What it does: a learning app for kids at our Kenya or Ecuador school — math practice, Swahili/Spanish words, or reading — with levels and a score. Who uses it: village kids around 6–10, on the school laptops. Must never: require internet mid-lesson, or shame a wrong answer. Done when: a 7-year-old (or a coach acting like one) finishes a round without help, and three break-it tests pass.
Expert · Solar
Power the school
Starter brief — copy into your vision.md, then edit it
What it does: sizes the solar system for our school site — pulls NASA sun data for the coordinates, lets me edit the loads (lights, laptops, fridge), shows panels and battery needed. Who uses it: the build crew deciding what to buy. Must never: invent a number, let the battery go negative, or hide the worst month. Done when: changing the loads resizes the system instantly, and three break-it tests pass.
Power
Size a real solar microgrid, then watch the whole school's readiness on one screen.
Solar Microgrid
Size a real off-grid solar system from live sun data.
✓Live NASA POWER irradiance (no API key), cached so it sizes offline once a site has been seen online
School Ops Center
Power, water, and connectivity in one readiness pane.
✓The readiness rollup logic is real and tested
Water
Test a source against WHO limits before anyone drinks from it.
Connectivity
Keep academics running through an intermittent satellite link.
Research
The instruments behind real, peer-reviewed student papers.
Frog Call Classifier
Bioacoustics from a hand-written FFT. The Ecuador research build.
✓Hand-written Cooley-Tukey FFT with Hann windowing — no DSP library
Community Health Survey
Offline-first field data collection with a live dashboard.
✓Offline capture and live aggregation are real (stored in your browser)
Research Assistant
A Claude mentor that sharpens a curiosity into a researchable question.
✓Live Claude (claude-opus-4-8) with a research-method system prompt
Teaching
Trilingual teaching that works with the internet off.
Village Tutor
A trilingual tutor for local kids. Works offline, smarter online.
✓Offline corpus plus a real arithmetic engine, tested
Lesson Generator
Claude writes a trilingual, low-resource lesson plan in seconds.
✓Live Claude (claude-opus-4-8) with a low-resource teaching prompt
Logistics
Get the right materials to a remote site at a known landed cost.
Language
The few right words that make a shared job site safer.