Cohort

Why We Built Cohort

One thing kept coming up across our interviews and survey responses: students said it was easier to stay on task when they knew other people were studying at the same time, even remotely. It lined up with what we were reading too, so we turned it into something testable.

Can just knowing your friends are studying alongside you make it easier to stay focused?

Cohort is our attempt at answering that, as directly as we could build it.

How It Works

You create or join a study session with three to six friends. Everyone in the session can see who's there and who's marked themselves as currently focusing. That's about it: no points, no streaks, nothing to compete over.

It's still changing as we build it, so what's described here may not match what you see if you test the fall version. Whatever we learn between now and then will shape it.

What We're Actually Testing

Whether shared presence alone (without chat, without competition) does anything for focus. It might not. If it doesn't move the needle, we want to know that as much as we want to know if it does, because either answer tells us what to build next.

Current Status

Cohort is in active development. This fall we're inviting volunteer high school students to try it during the exam period, and we'll be watching how people actually use it against what we expected going in. Whatever we find, supportive or not, we'll write up on this site.

GitHub: Coming soonLive Prototype: Coming soon