Lamppost — লেম্পোস্ট
An interactive AI classroom for Bangladesh and global education

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What is Lamppost?

Lamppost is a fork of OpenMAIC (Tsinghua University's open-source multi-agent interactive classroom) extended for Bangladeshi and global English-medium education.

It is not a chatbot and not a video platform. It is a complete virtual classroom where AI teachers lecture, draw on a whiteboard, give quizzes, and run simulations — and students can raise their hand at any moment to get a personalised answer in their own language.

The core innovation: a pre-computed Q&A bank

Unlike traditional AI tutors, Lamppost does not run expensive LLM inference on every student question. Instead:

1. Opus generates everything up front — lessons, slides, narration, quizzes, and a comprehensive Q&A bank of 1,000–2,000+ entries per chapter. One-time cost.
2. Embedding search handles 95 %+ of real-time interactions — student question → pgvector cosine similarity → pre-built answer. Zero LLM cost.
3. A small fallback model answers the rest — only novel questions escalate to Sonnet, Gemma, or Haiku.
4. The flywheel — every unmatched question is logged, batched nightly, sent to Opus, and converted into new Q&A entries. The bank gets smarter with every student.

After six months of live use, match rate approaches 99 %. The Q&A bank is the product.

What's different from upstream OpenMAIC?

	OpenMAIC	Lamppost
Target audience	General self-learners	SSC, HSC, O/A-level students in Bangladesh and global English-medium
Primary languages	English, Chinese	English, Bangla (বাংলা)
Content source	User-provided documents	NCTB + Cambridge/Edexcel textbooks
Intelligence model	Live LLM on every interaction	Pre-baked Q&A bank + embedding search + small fallback
Offline support	—	Full offline mode via Ollama + Gemma for schools with intermittent internet
Deployment	Vercel / self-hosted	Vercel / Supabase + Docker stack for schools

All OpenMAIC scene generation, multi-agent orchestration, and playback features are preserved and continue to work unchanged.

Quick start

Prerequisites

• Node.js ≥ 20, pnpm ≥ 10
• A Supabase project with pgvector enabled (for the Q&A bank)
• Ollama running locally with nomic-embed-text pulled (for embeddings)
• At least one LLM provider key (ANTHROPIC_API_KEY recommended)

Install

git clone https://github.com/ripclass/lamppost.git
cd lamppost
pnpm install
cp .env.example .env.local
# fill in ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, GOOGLE_API_KEY, Supabase URL + keys, etc.
pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

Apply database migrations

# from supabase/migrations — run against your Supabase project
supabase db push

School / offline deployment

docker compose -f docker-compose.school.yml up --build

This brings up the Next.js app, Postgres + pgvector, and Ollama (with Gemma) on a single host — fully functional with zero external internet dependency.

Architecture

See docs/architecture.md for the full technical design — the Q&A bank schema, the Opus generation prompt, the classroom interaction flow, model routing, and the Bangla translation pipeline.

Key directories:

lib/qa-bank/           Q&A bank engine (generator, embedder, search, router, flywheel)
lib/classroom-engine/  Smart interaction handler (match → serve or escalate)
lib/curriculum/        PDF parsing, NCTB/Cambridge content ingestion
lib/translate/         Gemini translation, Bangla utilities
lib/db/                Supabase client, queries, migrations
supabase/migrations/   Database schema
app/api/qa-bank/       Q&A bank search, generation, flywheel endpoints
app/api/curriculum/    Curriculum ingestion, chapter management
app/admin/             Admin dashboard (flywheel, analytics, cost tracker)
scripts/               CLI tools for batch operations

OpenMAIC modules under lib/generation/, lib/orchestration/, lib/playback/, lib/action/, and the existing components/ tree are untouched per fork policy.

Licence and attribution

Lamppost is licensed under AGPL-3.0, inherited from OpenMAIC as required by the upstream licence.

This project is a derivative work of OpenMAIC by the Tsinghua MAIC team, published in JCST 2026 (DOI: 10.1007/s11390-025-6000-0). All original OpenMAIC copyright and attribution is preserved. See CHANGELOG.md for upstream release history.

The name "Lamppost" is inspired by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's vision that every person deserves quality education regardless of where they were born — and by the founder's earlier 2019 project of the same name.