Our Story

We're a physics professor and a math professor at a big university, and parents to two toddlers who love a screen a little too much.

So we made a house rule: if the kids are on a tablet, they have to be learning something or making something. No mindless tapping.

That rule turned out to be harder to follow than we expected. Most “educational” kids' apps are either genuinely educational and boring, or fun and secretly built to be addictive: ads, subscriptions, reward loops designed to keep a toddler tapping, not thinking. We couldn't find enough that were actually both, calm and creative, built to disappear into a childhood instead of competing with it.

So we started building our own. Sapling Hollow Studios makes apps that let your kids be creative and learn, for curious kids roughly ages 3 to 10.

No ads. No subscriptions. Not addictive.

By day, we teach and do research (one of us works in quantum physics, which has approximately nothing to do with children's apps, but we think about hard problems for a living, and this is the one we most wanted to solve). By night, we're just two parents trying to build something better for our own kids.

No ads. No subscriptions. Not addictive. Not now, not ever.