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koda

Research notes

Three positions, in writing.

Koda is built on three load-bearing decisions: paper-first because the cognitive-science literature points there, on-device because biometric data about minors shouldn't live on servers, and neurodivergent-first because the kids most ed-tech treats as edge cases are who Koda was built for. This page is a stable index for journalists and educators who want to cite or link to the underlying notes.

  1. On the pedagogy

    Paper-first: why our tutor watches a worksheet instead of a screen

    The act of producing a letter shape — the variable, error-prone, motor work of making it appear from nothing — engaged a network of brain regions tied to letter recognition that tracing or typing didn't engage.
    • Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159–1168.
    • James, K. H., & Engelhardt, L. (2012). Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 1(1), 32–42.
    Read the full note →
  2. On the architecture

    Why we run on-device instead of in the cloud

    We don't think any of that should be true for a child's face. So we built the architecture so it can't be. The face vector lives only on the device in your home. There is no copy on a server because there is no server.
    • Local-only architecture: handwriting OCR · face embedding · on-device language model · local voice synthesis · deterministic math verifier.
    Read the full note →
  3. For neurodivergent families

    Math homework with ADHD: five traps and four moves

    ADHD doesn't respond to effort the way the homework instructions assume. If your child could 'just focus,' they would have done that already. Saying it doesn't add focus; it adds shame.
    • Field-grounded playbook for ADHD homework, mapped to Koda's defaults: configurable focus chunks, visual scaffolding when the topic has it, effort-tagged feedback, transition warnings.
    Read the full note →

For press, citations, and educators.

For interview requests, fact checks, or to cite any of these notes in academic or journalistic work, write to press@kodatutor.ai. The full press kit (logos, founder bio, fact sheet) lives at /press.

The Koda team is also open to co-bylines on the paper-first pedagogy note with active researchers in handwriting / motor-trace cognitive-science. The note has been written so a researcher's name can be added without rewriting the body. If you study this for a living and we should be talking, the same email gets to us.