An LMS that makes students do something

Most education technology digitises the lecture. Record the teacher, upload the video, call it a platform. Students watch, and retain very little, because watching is not learning.

The challenge

WeLearn's position is that access to content was never the bottleneck — engagement was. That demanded a platform where a student manipulates something rather than watches it, and where a teacher can assemble that without writing code. No off-the-shelf LMS does this.

The approach

We did not build a learning management system from nothing. The platform is built on LearnHouse, an open-source LMS, which already handles courses, a block editor, assignments, discussions, analytics and certificates well. Rebuilding that would have spent the budget on solved problems. Appable's work is the layer above it — the parts that make it a WeLearn platform rather than a generic one.

What we built on top

Sims. A simulation is a self-contained web app that the platform runs inside a sandboxed iframe: plain canvas, three.js, p5.js, Unity WebGL or Godot, it does not matter. The platform passes parameters in — sliders, choices, toggles — and receives events back. We wrote the SDK, the manifest format, the packer, the library, the player, and the blocks that place a sim on a board or inside a lesson, with limits and a strict allowlist of file types enforced on upload.

Study tools. Deck and quiz authoring screens, and a results view for teachers across a class.

Programmes. Course bundles with their own enrolment, progress tracking and completion certificates.

Payments. Chapa checkout with offers, orders and expiring access — a local gateway, because an Ethiopian school cannot pay with the card rails an upstream project assumes. Buyers stay enrolled in what they paid for.

Operations. A production image build workflow, and backup and restore scripts.

Where it stands

Running. Role permissions govern who can author flashcards, quizzes and sims.