Abstract

We describe a permission-scoped third-party API architecture for children's educational games and learning apps. A game client may propose real-world tasks to a child, styled in the game's fiction from real household context, and may receive a minimal completion notification when a family member witnesses the act; it can never hold payment, transfer, balance or reward-issuing scopes, so task completion issues no currency or points, and any reward is a human-initiated acknowledgment through the family's own ledger app. Parents approve which apps may propose to each child, revocably and default-off. With per-item parental consent and on-device processing, the family's own messages and records become instructional material: a grandparent's letter as reading text, a real thank-you note as the writing exercise, the family ledger as the arithmetic workbook, heritage-language letters for diaspora learners; family messages are never locked or delayed behind lesson progress. Each unit ends in a capstone performed for a real recipient, assessed by witnessed completion, with recipient veto and proficiency data kept private. Education apps report course completion followed by departure as their success metric in place of retention. A conferral tier in a revocable membership credential for child-directed apps requires these scopes, the no-gating rule, no export of child learning data, and statutory child-privacy floors. Three predictions are pre-registered. Stated limits: the design is unbuilt (n = 0); reward crowding-out is untested; browser deployments can keep data on the device but cannot run on-device inference; parental approval assumes a functional parent; no legal review has occurred.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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