قلم Qalam
An Arabic handwriting app built for children — every letter, every form, every word.
The problem with teaching Arabic handwriting
Arabic is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, yet children — especially those growing up in the diaspora — have almost no good digital tools for learning to write it. Most apps reduce it to vocabulary flashcards or animated videos. None address the fundamental challenge: Arabic script is complex to write. Each of the 28 letters takes a different shape depending on where it appears in a word, and learning those forms by hand, with proper stroke order and proportion, is the only way they become natural.
Weekend Arabic schools and home tutors still rely on printed worksheets. The pencil-and-paper approach works — but it doesn't scale, it doesn't adapt, and it doesn't hold a child's attention the way a screen does.
قلم means pen in Arabic. That's exactly what we put in a child's hand.
Every letter, beautifully organised
The home screen presents all 28 Arabic letters in a coloured grid, each in its isolated form with its Arabic name beneath. Letters are colour-coded to help children build spatial memory — warm tones, cool tones, and pastels across the alphabet.
A search bar lets parents or teachers jump directly to any letter by name in Arabic or English. Pinch-to-zoom adjusts the grid for younger children who benefit from larger targets.
Trace every form — مفردة · أول · وسط · آخر
Tapping any letter opens the detail view with a PencilKit tracing canvas. A faint guide letter sits on lined paper — children trace over it with their finger or Apple Pencil. The canvas scores the tracing in real time and rewards completion with a clear visual tick.
Four tabs switch between the four forms of each letter: isolated, initial, medial, and final. Many apps show only the isolated form. Qalam teaches all four, because that is what a child encounters when they open a real book.
A speaker button plays a real recorded Arabic pronunciation — not text-to-speech — for every letter.
Words come alive with colour
Every letter comes with three illustrated Arabic words. The Word tab shows a hand-drawn illustration the child can colour in — a star, a camel, a lion — using a full palette and marker tool. Coloring is calming, creative, and reinforces the visual shape of the word.
Below the illustration is the word itself in large Arabic script for tracing practice. Pressing the word card plays the recorded pronunciation, so listening and writing are always connected.
Three words per letter — 84 words total — cover animals, nature, everyday objects, and family vocabulary that children already know in spoken Arabic.
Built for Arabic first. Designed for every script.
Qalam is the first app in a multilingual handwriting platform. The core engine — PencilKit tracing, scoring, audio playback, adaptive layout — is shared across languages. The script, vocabulary, and direction are a plugin. Urdu is already complete. Farsi is next.
Qalam | قلم — Coming to the App Store
Built by Sedrah AI for Arabic-speaking families everywhere.
Notify me at launch