Finding a Home for Project Cognify
By the end of Phase I, we had research findings, survey results, interview notes, meeting notes and ideas scattered across notebooks, Google Docs, and different folders.
read more →Project Cognify
Investigating adolescent attention in an age of engineered distraction
Project Cognify started with a question we kept asking ourselves:
Why is it so easy to spend hours focused on a game, yet so difficult to stay focused on schoolwork?
We're Jonathan, Jeremy, and Ryan, three high school students who love technology, coding, and building things together. We first teamed up during a game jam last year, and after seeing how well we worked together, we wanted to take on something bigger. This is that project.
Instead of building an app right away, we decided to understand the problem first. We reviewed academic literature, surveyed 30 students (and counting), conducted interviews, and let the evidence shape where the project would go.
What we learned challenged some of our original assumptions. We began by focusing on FOMO, but the research pointed toward something broader. Motivation, social presence, and accountability appeared again and again, both in the research and in what students shared with us.
That led us to build our first prototype, Cohort, which explores a simple idea: Can simply knowing your friends are studying alongside you make it easier to stay focused? The first version is deliberately simple. You just see that your friends are studying too.
We don't know whether it will work yet. That's exactly why we're building it.
Recent devlog entries
How the Research Changed Our Hypothesis
By this point, we had completed our literature review and collected responses from our student survey. As we looked at everything together, one pattern kept appearing.
read more →What We Found in the Survey Findings
After weeks of preparation, our survey finally went live. This was the first time we were hearing perspectives beyond our own.
read more →Why We Started Sharing Everything
One question we kept asking ourselves was whether we should wait until we had results before talking about the project. In the end, we decided not to.
read more →