Questions and answers

A learning site for school-age children, covering math, reading and science from pre-K to grade 12. Lessons are things a child does rather than watches: they drag the fraction, move the number line, run the experiment, and the explanation follows what they just did.

No. Chapter 1 of every course, in every subject and grade, is open with no account and no card. That is deliberate — you should be able to see whether Cogito suits your child at their real level before paying anything.

Open a course and use "Find a starting chapter". It asks a few questions from each chapter in turn, starting at the beginning; the place it gets hard is the place to start learning. It takes about ten minutes, there is nothing to pass or fail, and it never marks anything as done — it only points.

Pre-K through grade 12. The early years lean on pictures, counting and objects a child can move; the later ones carry proper notation and multi-step problems. It is the same app throughout, so a family does not change tools as a child grows.

Any modern browser — phone, tablet, laptop or desktop. There is nothing to install. Lessons are built to be used with a finger as happily as with a mouse, and the worksheets print from the same page.

Not at the moment — new memberships are paused. Chapter 1 of every course is still free with no account, the Warm-up word problems are free at every grade, and a new account still gets seven free days of everything.

Yes. Creating an account opens everything for 7 days. No card is asked for, and nothing is charged when the trial ends — you simply drop back to the free chapters unless you choose to subscribe.

From the billing page linked on your membership page, in two clicks, at any time. Canceling is as easy as subscribing on purpose. You keep access until the end of the period you have already paid for.

On the payment page, after you pick a plan — Stripe shows an "Add promotion code" box there. A code that grants free access rather than a discount goes in the "Have a code?" box on the membership page instead.

Your card never reaches Cogito. Payment is handled by Stripe on Stripe’s own page; this site has no card field anywhere in it, so the details cannot reach us even in principle.

It stays. Progress, chapter checks and everything else are kept against your account; a lapsed membership closes the paid chapters, not the record. Subscribing again picks up exactly where the family left off.

No, and they cannot have one. A learner is a first name and a grade attached to your account — no email, no password, no way to sign in as one. That keeps children out of the account system entirely, which is the simplest way to keep their data out of it too.

No advertising, no third-party trackers, and nothing inside a lesson that tries to sell anything. The only thing Cogito ever asks a family to buy is the membership, and it asks a parent, on the membership page.

A child who is stuck can ask for a hint. It answers with a question and points at the picture in front of them — it will not hand over the answer. It is off until a parent switches it on, on the account page, and it is scoped to the lesson the child is actually on.

No. Each question is answered on its own and nothing is kept — not in the app, not in the database, not in our logs. The honest answer to "what do you keep of what my child typed" is nothing.

By default yes, because any child using the device can open the family page. If you would rather they could not, set a four-digit code: sign in, tap your name in the blue bar at the top, and under "Grown-ups only" choose "Set a code". The family page, the weekly letter and the learners list then ask for it on that device. Two more boxes there let the same code cover changing who is learning — worth ticking if one child opens another child’s name, since the home page shows the chosen child’s unfinished lesson — and Fun & Think, for families who want lessons before games. Both start off, and lessons themselves are never behind the code. It is friction that keeps a curious sibling out, not security: signing out is the only real lock.

A lesson is usually ten to twenty minutes, and it ends. There is no streak to protect, no daily reward to lose and nothing that punishes a child for stopping — the app is built to be closed.

The sequence is built against the Common Core mathematics standards and the Next Generation Science Standards, and each chapter says which ones it covers on the standards page. It is not tied to any one school’s pacing, so a family can move faster or slower than a classroom.

A chapter check is passed on first-try answers only. Retried answers still teach, but they do not count towards mastery — otherwise "passed" would only mean "eventually guessed right", which is not information a parent can use.

A family page with one row per course and one square per chapter, so you can see at a glance what is done and what wobbled. Every week Cogito writes you a short letter: what your child finished, what needs a second look, and one ten-minute thing to do together at the kitchen table.

Yes. A lesson left part-way through appears as a "carry on where you stopped" card above the courses on the home page, naming the lesson and opening it at the right place. It disappears once the lesson is finished, because there is then nothing to carry on with. The family page shows the same thing for each child, so you can see what is half-done without asking.

Yes. Every chapter has printable practice worksheets with an answer key, so the same work can happen on paper at the kitchen table. There is also a scratch pad inside lessons for children who think better by drawing.

Yes — that is the normal case. Subjects and grades are independent, so a child can sit in grade 5 math and grade 3 reading at the same time without anything nagging them about it.

The contact page takes messages and they are read by a person. Mistakes in the content are the ones we most want to hear about — tell us the course, the chapter and what looked wrong, and it gets fixed.