The Story Behind Simu — Building a Science Lab That Fits in a Browser

In 2021 we wrote about the story behind AnakBisa.com, our online coding classes for kids. Simu is the next chapter of the same conviction: Indonesian children learn best when they can do, not just read.

The problem we kept seeing

Ask a student to explain air pressure, or why a lens flips an image, and you'll usually get a memorized sentence — not understanding. The reason is simple: most students have never seen these concepts behave. Laboratories are expensive; many schools don't have them. And the best-known simulation platforms, like PhET from the University of Colorado, are excellent — but they're in English, and they don't follow the Indonesian curriculum.

So the question became: what if every Indonesian student had a science lab that fits in a browser, in Bahasa Indonesia, organized exactly the way their teacher teaches?

From concept to 450+ simulations

Simu started as a handful of physics experiments. Today it holds 450+ interactive simulations, 80+ 3D models, 240+ study materials, and more than 7,800 practice questions spanning SD to SMA — physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, geography, and IPAS — all mapped to Kurikulum Merdeka.

The hardest engineering problem wasn't any single simulation. It was scale: how do you produce hundreds of accurate, curriculum-aligned, genuinely interactive simulations without a hundred-person studio? Our answer was to treat content production itself as an engineering problem — an internal pipeline where AI assists in designing, generating, and QA-ing simulations, with humans directing and verifying every piece.

What "interactive" really buys you

A simulation is not a video. When a student drags a slider and watches pressure change, they're forming a causal model — the same mental act as a real experiment. That's why we insist every Simu simulation is manipulable: change the variable, see the consequence, draw the conclusion yourself.

This changes the classroom dynamic: instead of explaining an abstraction, a teacher can pose a question and let students discover the answer themselves.

Beyond the product

Simu is also an experiment in building an education business responsibly. A teacher affiliate program shares revenue with educators who help spread it, and we're building toward wider access for students who can't easily pay — because an education product should widen access, not just monetize it.

What's next

More simulations every week, deeper question banks across every subject, and richer 3D content. If you're a teacher, a parent, or a school, try it: simu.konsep.com — or read the full Simu case study.

And if you're a company wondering how AI-assisted content pipelines could work for your product — that's exactly the kind of problem konsep solves.