Essay assistant gets top marks

Challenge one of the 2025 Young Enterprise Scheme has seen a student-built, NCEA-tailored essay helper acknowledged as the most promising early business idea.

WordFrameAI has targeted assisting secondary school students to write better across their school assignments, without the risks of plagiarism that other AI tools pose by ensuring the work must be done by the student.

Team members Lawrence Piesse, Sanjiv Singh and Kahu …  say “it’s way bigger” than a spell checker, while actively helping teach technical essay skills.

“Our WordFrameAI web app supports learners without generating anything that could be fitted into your essays so you can’t copy from it,” says Sanjiv.

“Essentially, you’re forced to put everything into your own words and do the work, but it still has that support and improvements for helping students turn in better assignments.”

Kahu says a lot of teachers love the idea. “We’re using their know-how to help us finding that sweet spot in the middle between not helpful enough and doing it all for you.”

The basic code behind the web application had help from AI, with the WordFrame team having mentorship from Global Thinking AI’s Brent Carpenter as each team is buddied with a relevant local mentor.

However, with AI being such a new technology and open for overuse for students, CEO and codemaster Sanjiv says they are in uncharted territory, but are enjoying the challenge.

“We’ve had a lot of help from both our mentors and the Young Enterprise Scheme around the challenge criteria, but some of our specific problems can be hard to comprehend as it’s not something many are specialised in.

“But we managed to pull through and build something beautifully helpful.”