Lindsay DiCasolo has spent her whole career in schools. She’s been a science teacher, a junior high principal, and is now an elementary school principal.

Last year, her son started his freshman year at Penn State. She watched him, a student who graduated sixth in his high school class, struggle in his classes in an unexpected way.

DiCasolo and her husband, a solutions architect who designs computer programs mostly for the Department of Defense, decided to build something to help.

With her background in education and his in programming, they figured they could build it themselves.

The result is Kaleiopi, a web-based platform that helps Penn State students find study partners in their classes, plan their weeks, and study using research-backed methods.

“Kaleiopi was basically built out of a struggle that both I had, and now I’m watching my son have,” DiCasolo said. “High school was so structured; it was almost too easy. So when my son came here, he wasn’t prepared to build his own schedule, to have these innate study skills that he’s never had to use before, and also he couldn’t really put himself out there and connect with other kids.”

Kaleiopi is built on three pillars: connection, executive functioning, and study skills based in learning science.

For the connection pillar, students sign up by making an account with their Penn State email. After that, they select the classes they’re taking and block off class times, work, extracurriculars, and anything else that takes up their day.

That maps out each student’s available study time for the week. Kaleiopi then matches them with classmates in the same courses and shows how many hours of free time they share each week.

“There are so many kids in the same position,” DiCasolo said. “Everybody’s really smart here. Everybody wants to succeed, but not everybody knows how.”

From there, students can message their matches and schedule study sessions. For that first meeting with a stranger, the platform can put together an agenda for the session, starting with an icebreaker and moving through quizzing each other and teaching the material back.

“AI is already building a lot of things to help kids study, but I don’t feel that anybody’s put out the full package,” DiCasolo said. “You still have to go out and find different pieces in different places. Our goal was to put it all together.”

The executive functioning pillar came from the couple’s firsthand experience with their son.

“I thought he had time management, but what I realized is he was always managed,” DiCasolo said. “He had a high school schedule that went straight to sports, then straight to work, and he didn’t have to think about it.

“Now he has to think about it, and he just doesn’t have a whole lot of practice. When I talked to my son last year, he was like, ‘Mom, I studied for eight hours,’ and I asked, ‘During those eight hours, how much time were you on your phone?’ He said, ‘Four hours.'”

Kaleiopi tackles this by helping students build a weekly plan. The website creates a prefilled calendar based on the common rule of two to three hours of studying for every hour spent in class. Students can adjust those recommended hours and add other commitments they want blocked into their week.

The learning science comes in through Kaleiopi’s “study rooms.” Kaleiopi offers “smart study habits” tips, like how long to study at a time and why.

In the study rooms, students can also upload their class syllabus. AI will pull test, quiz, and project dates onto the student’s calendar.

Each room has a private space and a shared space, where anyone in the class can post notes, flashcards, and AI-generated quizzes, and ask and answer questions.

“I think that a trap that a lot of kids fall into is they keep reading their notes,” DiCasolo said. “When it’s right in front of you, they know it. Then, when it’s taken away, they realize they don’t really know it.”

DiCasolo sees Kaleiopi mainly as a tool for freshmen and sophomores stuck in big intro courses like economics, MATH 110, and CHEM 110.

Her own first couple of years at Penn State weren’t much different from her son’s.

“I had a very similar experience to my son,” DiCasolo said. “I found it a little bit lonely at first. I didn’t know how to study. I didn’t know how to read a textbook, because in high school everything was given to me. So there were so many parts that I could relate to.”

Kaleiopi officially launched to students through social media and is currently open only to Penn State students.

The DiCasolos’ next steps include turning the website into a mobile app and adding more AI features, like prompts that remind students to review a lecture’s main points on their walk home from class.

“We wanted to also teach kids so that when they didn’t have this app or if they weren’t using the app, they had an idea of what to do for themselves,” DiCasolo said. “This is our base, and we’ll just keep building.”