Ahmed Hmeid Contact
All work 06 · Arabic learning app for children

Hudhud

Learn Arabic with Hudhud, ten fun minutes a day. Letters, sounds, words and phrases for ages 4 to 11, wrapped in games.

Open hudhud.hmeid.uk

What it is

Hudhud is a daily Arabic app for children aged 4 to 11, in the spirit of the daily-practice maths apps. Each day brings a fresh ten-minute practice built around what the child finds tricky. Lessons teach before they test, and about half of every lesson is hands-on: feeding an animal the word it asks for, dragging vowel marks onto letters, tracing letters with a finger. Around that sit six worlds of skills, 28 games, quests, teams and Hudhud the hoopoe, who grows up as the child does. There is no AI inside the app: every word is hand-written and every voice clip was recorded once, ahead of time.

  • 32skills across six worlds, from letters to little sentences
  • 28games: 17 in the arcade, 11 in the Challenge Zone
  • 534voice clips, recorded once and never generated live
  • 0AI calls in the app: all content is hand-written

Key features

  • Ten minutes a day

    A daily practice of 12 questions: skills due for review, the weakest skill, and the next skill in up to three worlds, shuffled together. Finishing it opens a treasure chest.

  • Teach, then test

    A new letter or word is shown, spoken and explained before it is ever asked. Items the child gets wrong are picked more often until they stick.

  • Learn by doing

    Twelve kinds of question, about half of them hands-on: feed an animal the word it asks for, drag a fatha onto a letter, paint by colour words, spell from tiles and trace letters.

  • Six worlds, six bosses

    Letter Land, Word Garden, Shape Shifters, Vowel Valley, Reading Rocket and Chatter Cove cover 28 letters, 88 words and 21 phrases, with a boss battle at the end of each world.

  • 28 games to unlock

    17 arcade games open as the child levels up. The Challenge Zone adds 11 harder ones for older children: penalties, a robot programmed with Arabic directions, a potion recipe to follow and word roots to crack.

  • Hudhud, quests and teams

    Stars buy hats, glasses and places for Hudhud, who grows from chick to royal hoopoe. Daily quests, streaks, a weekly Team Cup, and scoreboards that only ever show made-up nicknames.

In action

The landing page: "Learn Arabic with Hudhud, ten fun minutes a day".
Home is an island: today's mission, the adventure trail, the arcade, races, a quiz show and Hudhud's nest.
Lessons teach before they test: a new sound is shown, spoken and explained first.
Learn by doing: the monkey asks for a word out loud, and the child feeds it the right picture.
Penalty Shootout: shoot at the picture for the word, then save by diving to the word you hear.
The adventure map: six worlds of skills, each ending in a boss, with a crown for every skill mastered.
The Challenge Zone: 11 harder games on grammar, roots and reading, opened by level and age.
Hudhud's Nest: learning fills Hudhud's tummy, levelling up grows him, and stars buy new outfits.
Scoreboards for the week, the Team Cup and every game, showing made-up nicknames only.
The Speed Arena: sprints, a 25-question Soundcheck and a race against a real player's ghost.
Grown-ups get a progress report: skills mastered, accuracy, speed rank and the last 14 days.
Built for phones first: the island home screen.
Letter Pop: pop the balloons with the letter you hear.
Robo Route: read the Arabic mission, then program the robot with Arabic direction cards.
Big Hudhud in his crown and star glasses, full and happy after today's practice.
Under the hood

The parts that aren't obvious

  1. An adaptive engine, not a fixed course

    Every skill has a mastery score that climbs more slowly near the top and drops on a wrong answer. A skill opens when the ones before it reach 50, counts as done at 80, and comes back for review after 1, 3, 7, 14 and 30 days. Within a lesson, items the child got wrong or has never seen are several times more likely to come up.

  2. Every voice checked by a machine

    The clips were made once with ElevenLabs. Scripts transcribe the Arabic letters, syllables, words and Challenge lines with speech-to-text and remake any clip that does not say what it should, trying other voices and models and keeping the closest match. Single syllables are recorded three times over ("ba ba ba"), because text-to-speech misreads a lone syllable.

  3. Tracing judged by geometry

    The real letter is drawn from the app's font onto a hidden canvas and sampled. A trace passes when it covers at least 60% of the letter, dots included, and at least 60% of the ink stays on it.

  4. Arabic that reads properly

    Self-hosted Noto Naskh for textbook letter shapes and clear vowel marks, right-to-left isolation for every run of Arabic, and zero-width joiners to show the four joined forms of each letter. Every game measures itself and scales down to fit, so nothing ever scrolls mid-play.

  5. Safe on a shared database

    Children never log in: a signed cookie remembers who is playing, and "Try it now" makes a guest family that a grown-up can claim later. The app has its own database role on a shared Supabase project, with row-level security, no Data API and no secret key, and the server re-checks every lesson and caps every game score.

Built with

App
  • Next.js 16
  • React 19
  • TypeScript
  • Canvas
  • Web Audio
Content
  • Hand-written curriculum
  • ElevenLabs (recorded once)
  • Fluent Emoji 3D
  • Gemini (art painted once)
Data
  • Supabase Postgres
  • Supabase Auth
  • PostHog (no cookies)
Quality and hosting
  • Vitest
  • Docker
  • Coolify