For educators
Tradewinds is a small school with eight scholars to a teacher, so we can try something new one week and see how it went the next. We publish what we build, and we help other schools that want to use it.
On 20 February 2026 we hosted a luncheon in Honolulu for pediatricians, psychologists, educators and tutors: the adults who usually notice a gifted child years before a school does, and who are rarely in the same room together. The subject was what giftedness looks like from each of their chairs, and what it costs a child when nobody names it.
Our founder wrote Progressive Education Needs Progressive Technology for the Hanahau‘oli Professional Development Center blog, published 7 August 2026. The case it makes: software built for children is designed with less care than software built for adults, and a school that adopts a tool adopts its values along with it — “the tools we adopt carry values, and those values get absorbed into our practice.” The cheaper software gets to build, the less excuse a school has for letting a vendor decide its pedagogy.
This is the part that is still more intention than record. We have held one workshop for teachers so far, and it was small. What we can offer a school that knows its students are offloading the thinking and does not want to answer that with a ban: a working example, the code behind it, and what we learned building it. A school could run Rabbithole as it is, change it to fit a subject we do not teach, or build its own thing and take only the lessons. If you teach or run technology at a school in Hawai‘i and want to talk, write to Andy.
Rabbithole’s source is public, and so is the exact text it follows when it talks to a child: the instructions themselves, readable by a parent or a teacher who wants to argue with them.
If you teach, or you run a school, and you want help with any of this, there are three ways it usually goes.
Run it as it is
Set the work, watch it live, read what came of it. No cost, and nothing to sign.
Change it
Fork the source and make it fit your subjects, your ages, and the way your teachers already work.
Build your own
Take the instructions and what we have learned, and write your own. This is the outcome we are least precious about.
Write to andy@tradewinds.school and say which one you think you want. We will tell you if we think it is the wrong one.
Hawai‘i leaves gifted education largely to individual schools. The state does not require that gifted students be identified, mandates no particular services, publishes no program standards, and, as the Department of Education itself has noted, requires no gifted credential of teachers, because no Hawai‘i university offers one. In the 2022 to 2023 school year the state counted 2,758 students identified as gifted out of 168,634 in its public schools, about 1.6 percent. In 2008 the same department counted 9,858. Families here have had good schools for a long time; they have had few options built around a child who is ready to move faster. A school our size can work something like a lab school for the rest of the state: try things, measure them, say what happened, and share it.
The school is grounded in time-tested gifted and progressive education practice, the kind our Head of School has worked in for three decades, with an eye toward what comes next. The people who built that tradition were the innovators of their day, and we take that as the instruction. Every project runs the same inquiry cycle, so a scholar learns the shape of inquiry rather than the shape of one assignment. What is ours is the software built to hold that stance when a teacher cannot be at every table at once, and a plain account of whether it works.
“We’re giving away the code for free. So this is not a business. This is a passion project and a gift.”
What Rabbithole is for, what it refuses to do, and what a BunnyPad is are on the technology page.