Stepstones

App Icon
Home Screen
Choose a Learning Path
Each path is broken down into smaller milestones
Log achievements and attach pictures to commemorate each milestone
Create Practices to reinforce habits
Check in regularly to reinforce habits

Inspiration

When my children were just a few months old, developmental milestone standards were a guiding light for me. I referred to them often to understand what skills were within reach and which ones we, as parents, could help our children develop.

When those guidelines largely ended around age five, I distinctly remember wishing there were another roadmap to help guide us through what came next. That seed of an idea stuck with me until these past few months, when with the help of AI, I could make that dream a reality.

What it does

Stepstones suggests and tracks milestones for kids.

Choose what matters for your child—whether it's learning to swim, becoming more independent, building social skills, or trying something new. Discover curated Stepstones that break bigger goals into achievable milestones.

Celebrate accomplishments, capture memories with notes and photos, and build a timeline of your child's growth. Never fumble through your photo library in search of your child's landmark moment again.

Stepstones provides the challenges. You provide the encouragement.

FEATURES

Discover meaningful skills across life skills, sports, creativity, and social-emotional development
Break big goals into small, manageable steps
Choose what matters to your child and start anywhere
Track accomplishments with notes and photos
Create custom Practices for skills and positive habits
Earn points and celebrate progress
Works offline—no internet required. All user data stays on the device.

Every child grows differently. Stepstones offers ideas and guidance—not rigid requirements—so you can choose what fits your child and help them grow at their own pace.

How we built it

The app was primarily built using Claude Code.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was designing the usability. I iterated through a few different names for the entities, until finally landing on something I thought was self-explanatory and could fit into one coherent analogy for a learning journey. I also needed to make sure kids wouldn't be bothering the parents to log an achievement each time they accomplished something trivial. The last thing I wanted was to give parents more work. Lastly, knowing when to stop adding features is also a challenge. There are so many features on the roadmap, but at some point you have to ship!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Usually when I have a problem I hope can be solved with technology, what I find is -- "there's an app for that!" To my surprise, I searched and searched and couldn't find any app that addressed the parenting problem I had. To be able to contribute something novel is something I'm quite proud of.

What we learned

Through this Shipaton hackathon, I discovered so many tools in the app development ecosystem that I had never even heard of.

What's next for Stepstones

The logical next step would be to add more learning paths. There's no reason to limit the learning paths to youth-only skills. Adults, too, can benefit from breaking down their learning into smaller, achievable milestones. I also plan to add a premium feature where users can ask AI to generate the learning content themselves while taking advantage of the user interface for recording milestones. We can also scale the targetable audience by building for Android and adding internationalization.