Cohort
Our current research instrument
Cohort is a lightweight web application we are building to test the central hypothesis: that shared social presence — the awareness of others working on the same task at the same time — can improve focus among high school students without requiring competition, leaderboards, points, or any gamification mechanism.
The tool is deliberately minimal. A student creates or joins a session with 3–6 friends. Each participant can see who else is present and whether they are currently marked as focusing. There is no leaderboard. There are no streaks. There is no way to compare your focus time to anyone else's. The only information shared is who is here and whether they are working.
This stripped-down design is a methodological choice, not a product decision. If we added points or competition, we could not know whether any focus improvement was caused by social presence or by gamification. Isolating the variable is the whole point.
Current status
Cohort is in development. We plan to run structured testing sessions with volunteer students later during the exam period in October–November 2026. We will report results in the devlog.
GitHub (work in progress)Live version: not yet available