I don't have a studio. I don't have a team. What I have is a smartphone — and that single constraint ended up shaping every decision behind RandomTyms, an AI-animated Tamil-English educational brand built around two characters, Lokesh and Varsha, and now a small suite of free learning apps.
This post is about the "how" — not the brand story, but the actual technical build: a PWA hub, an AI-powered quiz generator, and the scrappy fixes that come with building mobile-only.
What I ended up shipping
The core of it is a Progressive Web App hosted on GitHub Pages: randomtyms.github.io. It bundles together:
AI Textbook Quiz Generator
— generates quizzes from textbook content using Google Gemini, with OMR-style answer bubbles and score-tiered feedback
Spinner Wheel
— a simple randomizer for classroom use
Multiplication Practice — quick-fire drills for kids
Symmetry Detective
— an interactive shape-recognition tool
All free. No sign-up, no ads, no tracking.
Building the PWA hub
The hub itself is a manifest + service worker setup, which sounds simple until you're debugging it entirely from a phone browser's dev tools.
A few specific things that took longer than expected:
Live content feeds: the Blog tab pulls from a live Blogger JSONP feed, and the Shorts tab runs through an RSS-to-JSON proxy — no dashboard, just feeds updating automatically.
YouTube thumbnails silently failing: this one took a while to track down. Shorts-style RSS links didn't match the video ID regex I was using, so thumbnails just wouldn't render for some videos. Fixed it by adding /shorts/ pattern matching plus a fallback to the guid field.
Building the quiz generator
This is the piece with the most moving parts. It's not just "call an API and show the output" — the widget needed:
Prompt engineering tuned so Gemini reliably hits a minimum question count (it would sometimes shortchange this)
CSV export handling — cleaning up BOM characters and CRLF line endings that were quietly corrupting downloads
OMR-style answer bubbles and score-tiered feedback, built as a reusable embeddable component (rt-quiz-embed.html) and a full standalone version (rt-quiz-full.html)
Basic security hardening on the widget itself
One unexpected debugging detour:
Google Safe Browsing flagged the blog at one point. After digging in, the likely trigger wasn't the quiz code — it was the instructional pattern
"copy this prompt → open Gemini → paste → send"
reading as suspicious to automated scanners. Worth knowing if you're building anything that walks users through copy-pasting into another AI tool.
Making the repo actually discoverable
Shipping the apps was only half the job — a live PWA with no polish around it just doesn't get found.
Recent cleanup included:
A`` proper README.md with screenshots of each app, not just a text description
MIT license added (code only — the characters and brand art stay separately owned)
GitHub topics (education, pwa, kids-learning, quiz-app) so it surfaces in topic search
A pinned profile repo and a real profile picture instead of the default identicon
Small things, but they add up to a repo that looks maintained rather than abandoned.
What's next
More apps are in active development on the hub. If you're curious about building AI-powered tools without a team or a dev environment beyond a phone, happy to answer questions in the comments — this whole thing has been one long lesson in working within constraints rather than around them.
🔗 Try the apps: randomtyms.github.io
📖 Follow the blog: lokeshvarsha.blogspot.com
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