Project Cognify

Why is it so easy to spend three hours locked into a game, but almost impossible to spend thirty minutes on homework? That question is where Project Cognify came from, and we still don't have a full answer.

We're Jonathan, Jeremy, and Ryan — three high schoolers who met at a game jam last year and got along well enough to want to try something bigger afterward. This is that something.

Rather than jump straight to building an app, we spent the first few months just trying to understand the problem: reading academic papers, running a survey (30 students so far), and talking to people about how they actually study. We let what we found push the project around instead of forcing it toward whatever we'd originally assumed.

That turned out to matter. We went in expecting FOMO to be the main driver, and it wasn't — motivation and just knowing other people are around kept coming up instead, both in the papers and in what students told us.

So our first prototype, Cohort, is built around a much narrower bet than we started with: does it help to just see that your friends are studying too, even if you're not studying together? No streaks, no leaderboard, nothing gamified — just presence.

We genuinely don't know if that's enough. That's what we're testing.