Schools want pupils to use digital tools, but the tablets and laptops they buy are built to compete for attention. Several head teachers asked our supervisor for something quieter. Manuscripta is what we built: AI lesson materials on e-ink tablets, with the teacher in charge of the room.
What it does
A teacher can import or write their own lessons, or generate worksheets and readings with a model running on the laptop. Generated materials are anchored in the textbooks and documents the teacher provides. The teacher sends them over the school’s local network to a class of e-ink tablets. Students join with a temporary alias, not an account. When they answer, the model marks written answers against the teacher’s mark scheme and drafts feedback, but nothing reaches a tablet until the teacher has read it and approved it. The window above is a snapshot of the real teacher app: click through any tab, or play the lesson, from the library to feedback on the tablet.
Why e-ink and a local model
Colour screens distract, and the e-ink systems that already exist keep the teacher out of the loop. Manuscripta keeps the teacher in it: they can lock every tablet, push a reading to the class, see who has raised a hand and decide what feedback goes back. The model runs on the teacher’s laptop for privacy: pupils’ work, which can be sensitive, never has to be sent to the cloud. It stays on the school’s network, with no accounts to manage. The National Autistic Society advised us on accessibility, which is why a teacher can set a reading age separately from a pupil’s actual age.
Our demo tablet was an AIPaper e-ink tablet provided by UCL. Schools with a reMarkable 2 or a Kindle Scribe can receive worksheets as PDFs instead.
What teachers said
I showed Manuscripta to teachers, and four of them gave us these comments.
The screen locking feature is really helpful for classroom management. It takes away the extra workload of having to constantly manage what students are doing on their devices. While the live digital feedback might not be as applicable for highly visual subjects like Art, it’s clear how much maths and science teachers will benefit from it. 100% would use the screen locking!
Art TeacherSandringham School, St Albans
Looks amazing! I like that you can choose the reading age and the actual age separately, so students don’t get content pitched too young, which can be a massive barrier to learning. I love that it goes straight into the editor with no copy and pasting or time wasting. I also like that teachers can do their own marking, as sometimes students can gain a few points for showing understanding even if they made a mistake with the adding up. It would definitely be useful in the classroom as teachers struggle to produce differentiated classwork and have limited time to prepare lessons.
Learning Support AssistantTownsend Church of England School, St Albans
I like the look of Manuscripta and think it could be really useful. I liked the distraction-free tablet, that teachers can modify AI generated materials, that you can upload your own materials and the AI creates from them, and the ability to distribute, lock and monitor student tablets. AI marking is great too and you’ve still got control over it. A useful addition would be having exam board mark schemes built in, so tasks and feedback could target these specifically. But overall it looks very promising!
Head of GermanSt Albans School, St Albans
This is really going to benefit students who need distraction-free learning. The text and screen colours work well together too - they gave me a sense of calm and I felt less eye strain while reading. The ability to change the vocabulary depending on actual age and reading age is brilliant, particularly if it lets teachers produce differentiated work for individual students without it looking too obvious. The one thing students hate is standing out by having something different from their peers, and I think it would also encourage staff to differentiate more as it’s easy for them to do. Being able to give immediate feedback as students finish a task makes it more relevant to them while it’s still in their minds. My only question would be whether the generated feedback also takes into consideration the student’s reading age - the more independent the learner is, the better!
Learning Support AssistantTownsend Church of England School, St Albans
Personal views from teachers who tried Manuscripta; not on behalf of their schools.
How we built it
We were four students with a short brief, a supervisor, two industry partners and the National Autistic Society. We gathered requirements from teachers and therapists in special educational needs settings, took prototypes back to them, and wrote what we learnt into a numbered specification. We built teacher-portal and tablet UI prototypes, and wrote the specification, the API contract and the Android system design.
We split into a Windows pair, who built the teacher app, and an Android pair, who built the tablet app. I was the Android app’s architect and, in practice, its project manager. I turned our system design into a plan of GitHub issues, each a small specification with acceptance criteria, set up the Android CI, and wrote the style guide the tablet interface follows.
Presenting
Every month we scripted a short update on what we had done and what came next. I produced those videos and the final project video, and my years as an audio engineer came in handy for the voice-overs and the edit. In January, Raphael and I presented Manuscripta at BETT, with interactive prototypes for visitors to try.
Looking back
This project was developed around when coding agents became dramatically more reliable, so code generation became close to free and the bottleneck moved to review. The core lesson was that you still need a deep understanding of the system, and how it works, to build it to a high quality: you have to keep hold of the reins. Agents would sometimes pass a test without fixing the behaviour behind it, which taught me to check fitness for purpose, not just the spec. I still wrote some parts by hand, like the tablet’s UDP discovery, as a point of personal development: I wanted to understand them, not just accept them. The thing I’m proudest of isn’t a feature: it’s the habits that kept the codebase legible and safe to change under pressure.
Built with Raphael Li and Nemo Shu (Windows app) and Priya Bargota (Android app), supervised by Prof. Dean Mohamedally at UCL. Partners: Qualcomm, the IBM Granite+Interactions Group and the National Autistic Society.