find. quote. check. organize.
A research workspace for school-age learners over the same knowledge graph the Academy teaches from. The AI has four tools and no pen: it finds sources, quotes them with provenance, checks a claim against a quote, and organizes the evidence. The learner writes every sentence. Free to any learner, anywhere.
Each concept in the graph carries one of five states for each learner. The states reuse the Academy's mastery signals and add a reviewed production at the top. A teacher can see, question, and override any state, and the override is recorded.
The concept is reachable. Its prerequisites are understood and the learner has opened it.
Route exposure and an open event.
The learner can recall the concept's claim and place it in the graph.
Spaced-repetition retrievability above the Academy recall threshold.
The learner can apply or explain the concept in a fresh context.
A constructive task passed: self-explanation, a worked example, or a quote-and-check task.
The concept holds over time and transfers.
Memory stability above threshold and a delayed transfer item passed.
The learner produced a claim with evidence and citations that reviewers accepted into the graph.
A reviewed production record with a citable id.
Retrieval over the canon, mirrored OpenAlex and Crossref metadata, and open-licensed public sources. Every hit carries a license.
Exact spans with source id, canonical URL, license, and locator. The tool refuses to paraphrase.
Does a quoted span support, contradict, or fail to settle the learner's claim. The tool abstains when retrieval is weak.
Claim, evidence, and warrant scaffolds; outlines; citation formatting. Labels only, no generated prose.
A learner or a teacher picks a frontier: a concept at the edge of a branch, or a live hypothesis from Bucket's hypothesis engine. The router walks the prerequisite graph backward to what the learner already understands, then forward again to the target. Supports fade as the learner's state rises.
A production is a claim, the quoted evidence behind it, the checks it passed, and its citations. When a teacher and a Bucket reviewer accept it, the production becomes a node with a citable id, registered on the same rail as every paper on this site, and the hypothesis engine can read it as evidence. Citation fees for a contributor under eighteen go to a guardian or a custodial account, never to the minor directly, and recognition ships before any payout does.
The consume side: spaced-repetition mastery over the foundations of each branch. Research OS reads the same states.
The L0 to L5 climb from literacy to producing knowledge. Research OS is the production path for the K-12 rung.
The tools, datasets, atlas, and papers. Accepted student productions land here as citable nodes.
Design, iteration 2, September 2026. The built Phase 0 prototype covers one path in grades 3 to 5, why the sky is blue, walking from light and air facts forward to Rayleigh scattering and the lambda-to-the-minus-4 law, per the system review's Phase 0 slice (_intake/research-os-k12/RESEARCH-OS-K12-SYSTEM-REVIEW.md section 8). A companion path over the history of quantum physics, grades 9 to 12, was this plan's original iteration-1 slice and stays an open choice for which subject demonstrates the product next (section 11, question 1). The plan, the learner-state model, the production schema, the vendor and data-source map, and the funding and people map are public in the repository under learning/research-os/ and _intake/research-os-k12/. Pilot classrooms, a pre-registered study of the four-tool constraint, and a state-validation paper come before any wider release.