Why Kraemon exists
And home is where almost all revision actually happens.
I spent sixteen years teaching science in Leeds and Bradford, latterly as a faculty leader. Like every school, we taught revision alongside the subject — how to plan it, how to space it, how to test yourself instead of reading the same page for the fourth time.
But being taught something and doing it are two different things. Revision technique is abstract, it's genuinely hard to get your head around, and it's the first thing to go when a fifteen-year-old is tired and working alone. It gets nodded at in September and quietly neglected long before the exams arrive.
Then the bell went, and all of it walked out of the door with them.
Everything I could give a student stopped at the classroom wall, and the part that decides their grades — the hour on a Tuesday evening, alone, at a kitchen table — was the part I had no way to touch. Sixteen years of watching that gap and being unable to do anything about it is the entire reason this app exists.
Here's what I watched, year after year. A student sits down meaning to work. They re-read their notes. They highlight. They copy things out neatly. They spend forty minutes hunting for a better resource, or a better revision timetable, and go to bed feeling like they've revised.
None of that is laziness. It's that the hard thing that works doesn't feel like it's working, and the easy thing that doesn't work feels great. Effective revision feels like failing — that's literally the mechanism. So of course they avoid it.
It isn't a knowledge problem. It's a “what do I do right now, and is it the right thing?” problem — and at seven o'clock on a Tuesday there's nobody there to answer it.
That question is the one I wanted to answer. Not with more content. With a straight answer, every day, before the doubt has time to turn into procrastination.
It isn't trying to replace what your teachers give you. The notes, the textbook, the revision guide, the past papers, the targeted resources handed out in class — that is the real revision, and it's better than anything an app could invent for you.
Kraemon does include carefully curated flashcards and short knowledge checks, built topic by topic against your spec. They're there to supplement that work and give you an honest read on whether something has actually stuck — not to become the revision itself.
What you don't have is a plan that survives contact with a real evening.
Kraemon is a scheduling tool and a procrastination unblocker. It knows your exam board, your actual specification and your real exam dates, and it works out what to revise, when to revise it, and when to come back to it. Then it coaches you through doing it and gets out of the way.
You bring the effort. It handles everything you'd otherwise waste that effort deciding.
I don't think cost should come anywhere near a child's education. If a tool helps a fifteen-year-old do better in their GCSEs, whether they get it shouldn't depend on what their parents earn.
So every student gets all of Kraemon, free. No adverts, ever. No subscription, no premium tier, nothing locked behind a paywall, no data sold to anyone. That's not a launch offer that quietly expires — it's the point of the whole thing.
The parent and teacher tools, for following a child's progress, are where this eventually pays for itself. Fairly priced, at what it costs to run properly. The student app stays exactly where it is: free, for everyone.
I'm not a software company. I taught myself to build this because the thing I wanted didn't exist, and I was tired of waiting for someone else to make it. It's built in my own time, from the classroom up rather than the pitch deck down.
The hardest part hasn't been the algorithm. It's been the unglamorous bit — data protection registration, privacy documentation, the compliance work an app used by under-16s has to get right. I did that properly, and I did it first, because I would never hand a student of mine something I hadn't.
Every subject in Kraemon is mapped against the exam board's own published specification, checked board by board. Not a generic topic list with a subject name on top. If it says AQA Combined Science, it's AQA Combined Science.
Two old words for the two halves of the idea.
क्रम · krama
Ordered sequence — knowledge built step by step, each piece laid on top of the last.
μνήμων · mnemon
One who remembers — the ancient art of memory, long before flashcards existed.
Sequence and memory. That's the whole app in two words.
No adverts. No feed to scroll. No social features, no comments, no followers. No engagement tricks designed to keep a teenager in an app longer than they need to be — Kraemon is trying to get them back off their phone and into the work as fast as possible.
It isn't a gimmick and it isn't selling you anything. It's a teacher's answer to a problem I watched for sixteen years and couldn't fix from the front of a classroom.
Tom
Founder, Kraemon · Science teacher & faculty leader, 16 years · Leeds
Kraemon is out now on the App Store — free, with no adverts and nothing to buy. On Android or a laptop? It runs in your browser.
Download on the App Store → Open in your browser →For parents and teachers
Sixteen years of teaching it, and the research behind it — spacing, retrieval practice, why re-reading feels productive and isn't, and what genuinely helps at home in the run-up to exams. Practical, short, and never a sales pitch.
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