Spark by Sher

I was the only one at the table who wasn't in tech. But I left feeling like anything was possible.

One afternoon, I had lunch with a group of friends — founders, coders, builders. The kind of people who talk about ideas the way teachers talk about children: with complete and total belief in what they could become.

I sat there listening, watching their eyes light up as they described things they were creating. I wasn't part of that world. I'm a preschool teacher. I know Reggio Emilia. I know loose parts and provocations and the power of a well-placed question. I don't know code.

But they never made me feel excluded. At one point, someone looked at me and said: "If you've been wanting to try AI — this is your sign."

I went home thinking about that. A lot.

Ten years of planning lessons by hand. Because no tool understood what we actually needed.

If you're a teacher — especially in a Reggio Emilia-inspired setting — you already know the weight of Sunday evenings. The week's lessons aren't planned. You're tired. You've spent the entire day observing, responding, documenting, nurturing. And now you're supposed to generate creative, developmentally appropriate provocations from scratch.

I've done this for ten years. I know exactly what a good provocation looks like. An open-ended question that sparks genuine curiosity. A material invitation that respects the child's intelligence. A big anchor question that can drive an entire semester of inquiry.

The knowledge was always there. What I didn't always have — especially at 10pm on a Sunday — was the blank-page energy to produce it.

Generic lesson plan templates don't help. They're built for a different kind of teaching. What Reggio-inspired educators needed was something that actually understood the philosophy. Not just the format.

I kept thinking: there has to be a better way.

"What if I just try building something?" — and then I didn't stop.

I was about to wash up when the idea hit me. I opened my laptop. I had never seen words like Node, GitHub, Cursor, or Render in my life. I didn't know what they were. I just started.

I was Googling every few minutes. Breaking things. Fixing things. Trying to decode error messages that looked like another language entirely. There were moments I genuinely didn't know if what I was doing was even possible.

But I refused to give up. Because isn't that what learning is all about?

Three hours later, at 3:33am, my first live web app existed.

Spark: from topic to provocation — in seconds.

You type in a topic. You choose an age group — from toddler to kindergartener. And Spark generates a full set of Reggio Emilia-inspired learning tools, built on ten years of real classroom experience:

• Reggio Emilia-inspired lesson provocations
• Open-ended inquiry questions that invite genuine thinking
• Loose parts and material ideas grounded in the philosophy
• A big anchor question that can drive an entire semester of learning

It is not a replacement for a teacher's pedagogical thinking. It is a scaffold for it — a starting point for the educator who already knows what good looks like, but needs that first spark at the end of a long day.

I built this because I understood the frustration from the inside. And I wanted to make that process accessible — in seconds — for every early childhood educator who has ever stared at a blank page on a Sunday night.

Still kind of in shock. But the possibilities feel endless.

Before that night, I had never looked at code. Not once. I had never deployed anything. I barely knew what "deploy" meant. And now I have an account with Cursor, GitHub, and Render — and a live web application that real teachers can use.

The wildest part is that it only worked because I refused to stop. Every error message was a puzzle. Every fix was a lesson. And somewhere in those three hours, something clicked — not just technically, but in how I see myself as an educator.

If I can build this — with zero background, in the middle of the night, powered by sheer stubbornness — imagine what becomes possible when the knowledge you've spent a decade building meets the tools of this moment.

That's what Spark is. And that's why I made it.