Week 14: First look at the survey data
We finished collecting responses from 30 students across three grade levels last week. The numbers are more complicated than we expected — and honestly, more interesting.
read more →Project Cognify
Investigating adolescent attention in an age of engineered distraction
Project Cognify is a seven-month student research project investigating why high schoolers struggle to maintain sustained focus during schoolwork, and specifically whether engineered digital distraction is the primary cause or one factor in a more complicated picture. Three students —Jonathan (Research Lead), Jeremy(Engineering Lead), and Ryan (Outreach Lead) — are conducting the project independently, without institutional backing or funding. We have surveyed 30 students, conducted preliminary interviews, reviewed academic literature on adolescent attention and smartphone use, and are currently building a lightweight research prototype calledCohort: a web tool that lets small groups of friends study together in real time, sharing focus status without any competitive or scoring mechanisms. The project ends with a written research paper. We are not a startup. We are not a nonprofit. We are three students trying to understand something real.
Recent devlog entries
Week 12: Cohort prototype, first internal test
I got a working version of Cohort running this week. It's rough — the UI is barely styled and the real-time sync breaks if two people join too fast — but it works well enough to test the core idea.
read more →Week 10: Reading Twenge, rethinking our hypothesis
We've been reading more seriously into the academic literature this month. Jean Twenge's work on generational attention changes is directly relevant, but it also raises some uncomfortable questions about our initial framing.
read more →Week 8: Outreach update and what actually got people to respond
Getting 30 students to complete a 12-question survey turned out to be harder than expected. Here's what worked and what didn't, in case it's useful to anyone.
read more →Week 6: Defining what we mean by 'focus'
Before we could write a survey, we had to agree on what we were actually measuring. It took us about three weeks to realize we were using the word 'focus' to mean three different things.
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