Everything Purple can do

💬Play

You ask, Purple answers. Type words, math, or colors, press Enter, and see what happens. No AI, just regular if/then logic, so it never says anything unexpected.

Words and emojis

• Type a word and it becomes a picture: cat is 🐱, trex is 🦖, rainbow is 🌈. Over 400 words work, including kid words like kitty, doggy, moo, roar, and yay.
• Count things: 3 cats 🐱🐱🐱, cat times 5, 5 x 2 dinos. Plurals count too: cats gives you two.
• Add them up: 4 birds + 2 owls shows both flocks with a count.
• Whole sentences get illustrated: I love cat becomes I 😍 🐱.
• Words Purple doesn't know still do something: every letter shows up as a colored block, so nothing is ever a dead end.
• Standard emoticons also work: :) :D ;) <3.

Reading out loud

• Add ! to anything and Purple says it: cat!, red + blue!, 2 + 2! says "2 plus 2 equals 4".
• Whole sentences work: type I have 5 dinos! and Purple reads it back out loud.
• Or start with say: say hello, say wow.
• The voice is made right on the laptop. No internet, nothing sent anywhere.

Colors

• red + blue makes purple, yellow + blue makes green. The mixing uses the real physics of pigment, so colors behave like paint.
• Around 90 colors by name, from red to periwinkle, chartreuse, and bubblegum.
• Shade any color with words like dark, light, pale, neon, vivid, warm, and cool, and stack them: dark light blue works.
• Colors act like adjectives and paint the background behind an emoji: red apple 🍎, bright pink unicorn 🦄, and 2 + 3 dark red dogs colors all five: 🐶🐶 + 🐶🐶🐶.

Real math

• Answers up to 500 show as countable dots. 2 + 3 groups the dots so you can see the two and the three. 4 x 3 shows three groups of four.
• Bigger answers appear on a colored abacus, with rows for ones, tens, hundreds, all the way to billions. Count monkeys and the beads are monkeys.
• Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, with real order of operations: 2 + 3 x 4 is 14: multiplication first like they'll learn in school.Or they can write (2 + 3) x 4 and see the difference.
• Parentheses work, decimals work, and number words work: 1.5 + 2 is 3.5, and three cats counts three: 🐱🐱🐱.
• Messy typing still works: 5+3=8, 5 xx 3, and 3 timess 2 all figure themselves out.
• Dividing by zero gets you 🤷.

Patterns

• Type a pattern with dots and Purple finishes it: 2 4 6 8... keeps counting, 20 19 18 17... counts down.
• Works with emojis too: 5 cats ... counts the cats down to one, dinos ... 5 counts them up.

Odds and ends

• Suggestions appear as you type, with the emoji or color shown; Tab accepts.
• Press Enter on an empty line to try your last idea again.
• If Purple fixed a typo for you, it quietly shows what it did.
• repeat 3 cat does it three times.

🎵Music

The whole keyboard is an instrument. Letter rows play notes, the number row is a drum kit.

• No wrong notes: every letter key plays a note in a major scale. Three keyboard rows are three octaves.
• Four instruments: marimba, ukulele, accordion, glockenspiel, and they sound great. Real recordings, note by note.
• Loops: record one (hold Enter), play something, and it keeps looping while you play on top. New notes join as it goes, each keeping the instrument it was played with.
• Change the musical key: the arrow keys move around the circle of fifths through five friendly keys (B flat, F, C, G, D). A little wave rolls across the keyboard as the key changes.
• A drum kit: ten percussion sounds on the number keys: kick, snare, hi-hat, clap, bell, woodblock, triangle, tambourine, bongo, gong.
• Say Letters mode: every letter is spoken out loud as it's pressed, with the note playing softly underneath. Great for learning the alphabet.
• Note names: tap Space to label every key with its note. Each press also flashes its note name.
• Colors: letters on the screen light up in their sticker color as you play!

🎨Art

A canvas where the keyboard is the paint.

• Every key is a color: the number row is white through black , the top letter row is reds , the middle row is yellows and golds , the bottom row is blues . A legend on screen shows which row you're painting from.
• Mixing: painting over a color mixes it, with the same real paint mixing as Play.
• Draw lines: hold Space and steer with the arrows, two at once for diagonals, or hold a letter to paint any direction in that color. Stamp, press down, stamp again, and Purple keeps the line clean.
• Pick up and erase: Shift plus any key picks up a color without painting, like dipping the brush. Backspace erases one spot; hold it to erase faster, and held arrows speed up too, so crossing the canvas is quick.
• Write right on your painting: hit Tab to switch from painting blocks to typing letters and words, straight on top of what you painted. Text landing on a painted spot flips black or white on its own, so it always reads.
• It keeps your work: your drawing stays on the canvas while you visit other rooms.

Code Space

Hold Space in Music or Art and a code window opens. This is real programming, inspired by the Logo turtle from MIT. Parents can switch it off until kids are ready.

In Art, code steers the paintbrush

• Loops: repeat 4 forward 10 green turn draws a green square, and orange repeat 4 right 4 down 4 draws stairs.
• Move the brush: forward, back, left, right, up, down, also go, move, walk, step.
• Turn it: turn left, turn around, spin, face up.
• Paint control: pen up, pen down, lift, paint on, paint off, color red, or just lead with a color.
• Any word order: green 10 down, 10 green down, and red down 5 blue right 5 all do the same thing.
• Paint words: paint hello paints the word, write hi types it.

In Music, you write tunes

• Letters are notes: abcdefg plays a scale, cdefgagf plays a melody.
• Tempo: fast and slow change it mid-line: fast abcdefg slow asdf.
• Instruments: choose ukulele, play marimba, even use glock works.
• Spoken letters: letters on turns them on from code.
• Repeat: repeat 3 abcdefg loops the phrase.

Everywhere in Code Space

• Forgiving spelling: forwrd 10, repeet 3, and chooze marimba all work.
• Suggestions as you type: color names after color, instrument names after choose.
• Hints: rotating "Try:" examples keep giving new ideas.

One key, one color

Every key makes the same color in every room, and the keyboard stickers in the box show which is which. Here's the map:

• The number row: white to black.
• The letter rows: Q row reds, A row yellows and golds, Z row blues, each running light to dark across the keyboard.
• The same key, everywhere: in Art it paints its color, in Music it lights up in its color, and in Play the letters of a made-up word show as their colors.
• Mixing carries over: paint a Z-row blue over an A-row yellow in Art and you get green, same as typing blue + yellow in Play.
• No reading needed: kids who can't read yet find their way by color. The sticker is the name of the key.

What they're learning

None of it looks like a lesson. It adds up anyway.

• Letters: Say Letters mode names each letter out loud as it's pressed, and Play reads words back as kids type them.
• Typing: real keys under real fingers, every day. Kids type before they know they're typing.
• Reading and spelling: words are how you make things happen, and forgiving spelling means trying is always safe.
• Numbers: math counted out in dots, place values on the abacus, patterns like 3 6 9.
• Colors: mixing that works like actual paint.
• Music: notes, rhythm, musical keys, and layering loops.
• Coding: commands, loops, and cause and effect, the same ideas behind every programming language.

The little touches

The quiet stuff that makes it work for a 3-year-old.

The keyboard

• Sticky shift: tap Shift once and the next letter is a capital. No holding down two keys at once.
• No accidental capitals: fast double letters like the "pp" in "apple" never capitalize.
• Kid math keys: the big = key just means plus, and dividing shows the ÷ kids learn in school.
• A second Escape: the backtick key ` in the top left corner works too: easier for small hands to find, and it covers MacBooks that have no physical Escape key.
• Mash-proof: mash the whole keyboard if you want. Nothing crashes, nothing breaks.
• Piano keys: in Music, holding a key is one note, like a real piano.
• Real words win: Purple never second-guesses them. tree stays a tree, white stays a color.
• A careful filter: anything spoken out loud passes one, built so innocent words like "hello" and "class" always get through.
• ALL CAPS option: shows every letter as a capital, for kids who know uppercase first.

Getting around

• The room picker: a tap of Escape opens it: Play, Music, Art, volume, or clear a room. Numbers 1, 2, 3 jump straight there.
• Clearing asks first: "Go Back" is the default, so a stray Enter never wipes a masterpiece.
• Arrow hints: each room shows a small hint of what the arrow keys do there.

It runs itself

• Starts straight into Purple: no desktop, no login, no update nags, nothing to click through.
• Close the lid: a sleeping face appears, then the laptop shuts itself down a while later. Open it and press any key to wake it right up.
• Naps on its own: left alone, it sleeps, then powers off: sooner on battery, later when plugged in.
• Kid-proof power button: a tap asks first, and only holding it forces off.
• It remembers: settings, volume, and the computer's name survive restarts.
• No internet, ever: everything on this page works with no account and no setup beyond plugging in.

For parents

Hold Escape down for a bit and the menu for parents opens, with the following:

• Littles Mode: lock Purple to a single activity for the youngest kids. Just Music, just Art, or No-Screen Music, where the screen stays dark and the keyboard just makes sounds.
• Install on this computer: move Purple off the Purple Key and onto the laptop for good, so it starts straight into Purple with nothing plugged in.
• Turn features on or off: switch Code Space, music looping, and changing musical keys on or off as your kid grows into them.
• Parent PIN: kids don't stumble into the menu on their own, so most people never need this, but you can add an optional 4-digit PIN if you'd rather they can't get in at all.
• Sound: set the volume anywhere from silent to full, and lock it so little fingers can't crank it.
• Display: brightness and contrast controls, on laptops that support it.
• Name this computer: give it a name that shows in the corner.
• Open Terminal: a full Linux terminal underneath, for curious parents. It's a real computer and you can look under the hood anytime.

That's most of it!