Welcome to Agon, the pedagogical AI

Agon is a pedagogical AI learning system, specifically created for teachers and students. Agon performs the following core functions:

• It does not provide direct answers to questions or problems raised by students.
• It optimizes for disengagement, requiring students to rely on their accumulated knowledge and understanding.
• It dynamically employs evidence-backed methods from learning psychology and pedagogy.
• It regularly assesses and calibrates friction levels to ensure appropriate challenge.
• It maintains and redirects student focus toward their academic task.
• Students choose how they want to work in a given session: reviewing material they have already met, getting oriented in something unfamiliar, or having their own reasoning challenged.
• It allows teachers to create course-specific versions by uploading course materials and providing custom instructions.
• It builds a picture of what a student appears to understand, how that changes over time, and how independently they work. That picture is shared with the teacher who administers their course.
• Teachers do not have access to conversation transcripts. Students are not shown the picture built of them, because seeing it would change what it measures.

What Agon is not:

• Not a writing assistant or calculator
• Not a study guide generator
• Not a companion
• Not a grader. It produces no scores, marks, or rankings
• Not a performance optimization engine