Hiraia

Hiraia is a free science tutor for Philippine elementary and junior-high students, aligned to the Department of Education's 2027 MATATAG science curriculum, that lives entirely on the phone. After a one-time download it works with the radio off, indefinitely: no account to create, nothing collected, and no personal data leaving the device. That is not a privacy flourish, it is the only shape the product could take for the students it is aimed at.

The deck ships with 50,000 science facts, 30,000 illustrations, and 20,000 mini-quizzes, all pregenerated from the MATATAG science competencies. Each card carries one fact and one illustration; after a few swipes a quiz checks what stuck, and a recap card comes back around to reinforce it. When a student asks about a topic the deck does not already cover, a separate fact bank indexed with LaBSE sentence embeddings retrieves the relevant facts and the tutor prints them as a new card - in Tagalog, English, or Bisaya.

Hiraia is a continued-pretraining fork of Qwen 3.5-2B, further trained on a Filipino and Bisaya corpus so the tutor can hold a conversation in those languages on-device rather than translating through English. As of early September 2026 it is in its second round of CPT with preliminary SFT, and ships as v0.1 early alpha. The target device is deliberately unambitious: Android 12 or later with 6 GB of RAM.

The app itself is a 296 MB install, but the first launch pulls roughly 2 GB of model and illustration files. Paying for that over cellular data once per student is more than most families can absorb, so Hiraia distributes the bundle over Pears, a peer-to-peer filesharing protocol. Once a single student on the classroom Wi-Fi holds a complete copy, the rest of the class pulls it from that phone and from each other - no second trip to the internet, and no central server in the middle.

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