How it works
A discussion, an object and an essay, all leaving a trace
Most TOK resources are a library of pages. This is a graph: 12 concepts, 5 areas of knowledge and 35 prompts, each connected to the others by an editorial decision somebody made and can defend, and 123 real cases hung off those connections. You can start anywhere in it and arrive somewhere useful.
What follows is the same product described three times, for the three people who ask different questions about it.
For students
The thinking is yours. The bookkeeping is not.
Everything below exists because a specific part of TOK is harder than it needs to be — not because it was easy to build.
Read the library without an account
Every published case is tagged to the concepts, areas of knowledge and prompts it raises, so you can start from a case you find interesting and arrive at the theory, rather than the other way round.
The 35 IA prompts, word for word
Rendered exactly as the guide has them, never paraphrased, shortened or restyled — a student who alters a prompt loses marks, so the wording is held byte-identical and a test fails the build if it drifts.
Your exhibition, with the arithmetic done
One prompt, three objects, and the commentary word count reported across all three as you write. Nothing is truncated at the maximum; you are told the number and you decide what to cut.
And a check nobody else can run for you
Two students in one class may share a prompt and may not share an object. Matching is on normalised titles, so a classmate who wrote about the same thing in different words is flagged before submission rather than after.
Your essay, structured but not written
You record what you think a title is asking before any commentary is shown to you. Then two areas of knowledge, a spine of claims with their grounds and counterclaims, and the three required interactions tracked. There is deliberately nowhere here to type the essay: the prose lives in your own word processor.
A Record of what you did, not a score
Seven arms, drawn from evidence, and every point on the shape resolves to a dated piece of work you can open. It is not a grade and it is not compared with anybody.
For teachers
A discussion was going to happen anyway
The product refuses to write a lesson, a commentary or an essay. What it does is hold the structure and the bookkeeping, so the hour you spend is spent teaching.
Plan a unit in the time it takes to read one
A generated unit is four cycles, twelve classes and sixty 5E phases, each phase carrying a framework element and a suggested case matched to the concept it teaches. Every activity box comes out empty, and stays empty: the product fetches the material and keeps the bookkeeping, and a teacher writes the lesson.
A library you can add to
Publish your own cases, with the knowledge question you would take them to. That hint is withheld from a student until they have written their own — generate before show, so the exercise is not done for them.
See a class without marking anything
Who has chosen a prompt, who has written nothing, where the word counts sit, and which two students have quietly picked the same object. All of it is a consequence of work students were doing anyway.
The essay, and the rule that cannot be undone
Where each student is across the six stages, and the one permitted draft of feedback tracked as an academic integrity control. No role can reset that counter, including an administrator, and the enforcement is a test over the whole codebase rather than a permission check somebody could add an exception to.
An evidence pack for programme evaluation
Mapped to Programme Standards and Practices identifiers, and equally explicit about what this product cannot evidence and the school must supply itself. An evaluator who finds a TOK tool claiming to evidence a language policy stops trusting the parts that were real.
For parents
What it holds about your child, and what it refuses to
You do not need an account to read this, and none of it is a promise made only here — each one is a decision in the data model or a test that fails the build.
There are no marks in it
No grades, no predicted grades, no percentages, and nothing that places your child above or below anybody. This is not a setting that could be turned on: the data model has no column to put a mark in, and a test refuses any code that would add one.
What it holds
The work they did and the day they did it — questions they wrote, positions they took, links they made. It also records which days they opened the product. The day only: not what they looked at, not for how long, not from where.
Who can see it
Your child, and the teacher of a class they have joined. Not other students, not other teachers, not another school. Ownership is enforced where the data is read rather than where it is displayed, so there is no page that could accidentally show it to somebody else.
They can take it with them, and they can end it
Everything in their Record can be exported in one file, in their own words. If they ask for it to be deleted it is deleted — and there is a test in the build that creates a student, gives them a full record, erases them, and then goes looking through every table for anything left behind.
Nothing here is designed to keep them on it
There is no counter that rewards showing up, nothing awarded for activity, and no board that puts one child above another. The build refuses code that would add any of them, by name — a check strict enough that this sentence had to be written without naming them, which is the point of it.
What it will not become
The list is shorter than the feature list, and it matters more
- It will not write assessed work. Scaffolding, questioning and structural feedback are in scope. A commentary or an essay written for a student is not, at any price.
- It will not grade.No mark, band or predicted grade for assessed work appears anywhere, and a teacher’s indicative note records a band key without ever reproducing the instrument.
- It will not compare people. No number in this product places one student beside another, in any view, for any role.
- It will not read a child’s work by machine. Where the product accepts something a student made, a human decides what it shows.