Turnip Learning

For curious kids, ages 3 to 9

Turnip Learning

The safe video world for kids: like YouTube, but built for learning, not engagement.

Coming to iPhone and iPad

In development. A family pilot on TestFlight comes next.

Turnip, the app's mascot: a lavender turnip with glasses and a green sprout
Meet Turnip

Who it's for

Little explorers.
Big questions. Grown-ups too.

Ages 3–5

Can't read yet?

Every topic is a picture you can tap. Big buttons, a giant Play and a giant Go Home, so a preschooler can find their way without help.

Ages 6–9

Obsessed with sharks this week?

Short videos strung into adventures, like Ocean Friends or Kitchen Science. When one ends, the next stays on the same topic instead of drifting into a feed.

Parents

Want to say yes to screen time?

No ads, no tracking and no algorithm. Settings sit behind a parent gate, kids' profiles are just a nickname and an avatar, and downloads cover the car ride.

The Home screen: new videos, the Ocean Friends and Kitchen Science adventures, and topic cards
New videos and adventures, front and center
The Explore screen: big picture cards for Ocean, Animals, Science, Frogs, Whales and Experiments
Pick a topic by picture
The Animals topic: large video cards for Blue Whale and Dolphins
Go deep on one thing

Screens from the current build. The v2 design is on the way.

The origin

It started in a barn, not a classroom

I'm Sarah Ritter. I've spent most of my life as a riding instructor and a Pony Club and 4-H coach.

I taught kids as young as four the parts of a pony: nose, tail, eyes, ears. I took high schoolers to national competitions where they had to identify bones, ligaments and teeth. I wanted an app that made that learning interactive.

Then I noticed my brother, a special education teacher, and my sister-in-law, a 3rd-grade teacher, needed the same pattern for entirely different topics, like the parts of a flower.

Abstract the interaction, not the content.

That was the product insight. Build templates that teachers can fill with their own material.

A 2016 Turnip Learning business card in purple: the Turnip wordmark, a sprouting turnip, and the line Grow with us. The same business card in green
Business cards from 2016: "Grow with us."

2015–2017

The first Turnip: a platform for teachers

Schools were buying a tablet or laptop for every student, but the content hadn't caught up.

The problem

  • Most teacher-made materials were PowerPoints, PDFs and worksheets: digital, but not interactive.
  • Educational apps didn't capture student progress, so teachers couldn't see who had finished or understood.
  • Professional course-authoring tools were expensive and built for instructional designers. One hour of interactive training could cost $11,000 to $15,000 to produce.
  • Teachers already shared and sold materials on Teachers Pay Teachers, which proved the demand. But that content was mostly print.

What Turnip did

  1. Create a course and upload photos, videos and text.
  2. Drop in an interactive template: label the parts of a picture, put steps in order, group similar items, match a term to a photo.
  3. Alternate clips and games, so students watch and then practice right away.
  4. Assign it on any device, with automatic grading and progress reports.
  5. Share or sell finished courses to other teachers in a marketplace.
A hand-drawn style wireframe titled Fraction Matching: tabs for Introduction, Activity and Summary, four shapes shaded to show fractions, and a list of fractions to match them to
Wireframe: a fraction-matching activity, tested with teachers before any code
The sorting game from the Turnip web app: two boxes labeled Mammals and Reptile on a purple background, with animal names like Whale, Lizard and Crocodiles to sort into them
The live web app at turniplearning.com: sort the animals into the right box

What the research said

I interviewed and observed teachers through New Hanover County schools and Watson College of Education events, then surveyed 48 of them.

  • 79% had already bought learning content online
  • 5–10+ hours a week spent on lesson prep
  • #1 request: easy to use, because there's no time to learn new tools

Personas, user stories and paper prototypes followed, with goals like "a teacher creates an app in under five days" and "a teacher checks out another teacher's course in under two minutes." The Lean Canvas changed every time a guess was proven right or wrong. When surveys showed overlapping vocabulary needs, for example, the audience widened to foreign-language teachers.

The startup

I incorporated Turnip Learning Inc. and joined the UNCW Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. A volunteer team of designers, developers and an intern, with advisors from UNCW's computer science and education faculties, produced a business plan, pitch decks, marketing materials and a working web app. We planned alpha and beta releases with Watson College's network of more than 2,000 P–12 teachers.

Ten years of versions

Same idea, new tools every time

Every version was something real people could touch and react to. The tools changed dramatically. The habit of building, testing with users and iterating didn't.

  1. 2015–2017 · Thesis and startup

    A web app I built myself

    Teacher login, a course builder, an image-labeling activity and a Postgres data model.

    Paper prototypes, Balsamiq, Vertabelo and DBSchema, a DreamFactory REST API, Bootstrap and React, hosted on AWS

    Learned Customer discovery, Lean Startup, leading a team, data modeling, and choosing (and mis-choosing) a framework

  2. After grad school · Agency work

    The same pattern, for a real client

    A very similar content platform, delivered to USA Swimming.

    A professional agency team

    Learned Shipping the pattern for a real client at scale

  3. Years ago · Native mobile

    A React Native app, compiled in Xcode

    Turnip moved from the browser to a native app.

    Self-taught: built, compiled and deployed it myself

    Learned Mobile build pipelines, native tooling and App Store realities

  4. March 2026 · AI rebuild #1

    Rebuilt from scratch with Claude

    A new iPad app with eight sample videos, built with Claude inside VS Code.

    Claude in VS Code, React Native

    Learned How fast a product manager can move when AI handles the boilerplate

  5. 2026 · The current design

    Designed in a system first

    An iPad kids app with a splash screen, sign-in, a profile picker, browsing by shows and episodes, a video player and a full design system.

    AI design-to-code in Magic Patterns, plus Claude. React, TypeScript, Vite, Chakra UI

    Learned Designing in a system first, and directing AI as a build partner

  6. Fall 2026 · AI rebuild #2

    Rebuilt for iPhone and iPad, videos on Mux

    Claude reviewed the old code with me and we wrote the plan down first. The previous build had spent weeks stuck on an unused library. The rebuild was a working app for iPhone and iPad in a day, with videos moving to a real streaming service.

    Claude, Expo and React Native, Mux video streaming, Supabase planned for accounts and data

    Learned When to rebuild instead of refactor, and why writing decisions down matters

  7. Next

    The v2 design, then a family pilot

    The new Turnip Learning brand, parent accounts, offline downloads for car trips, and a TestFlight pilot with families at home.

    Claude

    Goal Turning a prototype into a maintainable product

Where the idea is today

From the teacher to the family

Ten years later, the core belief is the same: kids learn best from short, great content followed by a chance to practice.

The shift was personal. Doing virtual school with my daughter, I found myself assigning YouTube videos from creators I loved, like Jack Hartmann, Danny Go and Emily's Wonder Lab, and watching random ads play between them. YouTube is built for engagement, not for kids, and parents feel guilty every time they tap play.

So Turnip now starts with a parent sign-in and a friendly profile picker. Kids browse shows and episodes, watch in a kid-sized player with big, simple controls, and play games that keep the original Turnip idea alive: watch a clip, then check what you understood.

What stayed the same

  • Interactive learning paired with video
  • Templates over custom builds
  • Progress that adults can see
  • Trust as the product

What changed

  • User: the teacher, now the parent and child
  • Platform: a Chrome web app, now a native iPhone and iPad app
  • Content: teacher-made, now curated, kid-safe creator videos plus games
  • Speed: a semester for the first prototype, now days for a polished app

October 2026

The v2 design

A child tester in the target age range called the current look "too babyish." That's fair. So v2 grows up a little without losing the fun.

Four versions of Turnip side by side: the original with a cream root, then three recolors with a white root and a darker outline, from soft lavender to vivid violet
Turnip, recolored rather than redesigned: the original, then three directions with a white root

What's decided

  • Fraunces for the logo and big headlines, DM Sans for everything else
  • A calmer lavender, plum and sprout-green palette taken from Turnip itself
  • Real nature photography: one subject, close and dramatic
  • Simple line icons inside colored circles
  • A set of expressions for Turnip: happy, thinking, surprised, celebrating, sleepy and pointing
  • Turnip Lavender
  • Glasses Plum
  • Sprout Green
  • Glasses Slate

Four worlds to explore

Each world is a bold color kids learn to recognize, and each holds about a dozen topics.

  • Nature

    Forests and jungles, deserts, rivers and lakes, weather and seasons

  • Animals

    Mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, animal homes, food chains

  • Earth Science

    Volcanoes, earthquakes, rocks and minerals, the Moon and stars, fossils

  • Biology

    Cells, the human body, life cycles, senses and the brain, photosynthesis

Building with Claude

What this fall's rebuild changed

The value of the old app was its idea and its design. Its foundation was the problem, so we started over and kept the parts that worked.

  • Removed an unused library that was behind weeks of build failures
  • Moved 537 MB of video out of the app and onto Mux, a streaming service
  • One codebase for iPhone and iPad, with a layout for each
  • Ready for Apple's newest iOS while still running on iPads back to 2018
  • All colors and fonts in one place, so the v2 design is a reskin, not a rewrite
  • Kids' privacy rules built in from the start, not added later
  • Every decision written down, so the work carries over from one computer to the next

Along the way

What ten years of building taught me

  • Product

    Problem discovery, survey design, personas, user stories, MVP definition, Lean Canvas, competitive analysis, pricing, roadmaps and pitching

  • Design

    Paper prototypes, wireframes, usability walkthroughs with teachers, and building and keeping a design system

  • Engineering

    React, React Native, Xcode builds, REST APIs, Postgres and JSON data modeling, AWS hosting and deployment

  • Leadership

    Running a volunteer team, choosing between Scrum and Kanban, owning stack decisions, and working with advisors and an incubator

  • Building with AI

    Using Claude and design-to-code tools to shrink the idea, prototype and test loop, and knowing when to refactor what the AI produced

Safe by design

Built for kids, not for clicks

Turnip follows Apple's rules for kids' apps and the children's privacy law updated in 2025. There are no ads, no third-party trackers and no open-ended recommendations.

A child's profile holds a nickname, an avatar and an age band. That's all. Grown-up settings, outside links and purchases sit behind a parent gate.

The goal is a screen you don't have to hover over.

Turnip Learning: coming to iPhone and iPad

Coming to iPhone and iPad

In development. A family pilot on TestFlight comes next.