AI Challenge Portal

Cognificance for schools and colleges

Make reasoning visible.

AI can hand any student an answer. Cognificance builds the skill behind it: students reason through AI-guided challenges one turn at a time, and your educators see exactly how each conclusion was reached.

Request beta access See how it works

Now in beta with invited institutions. AI Challenge Portal is the Cognificance product.

The same challenge after one exchange: the agent's opening message, the student's own turn labelled You, and the agent's reply beneath it, with the response box empty again.

Our mission

Grow minds, not just scores.

Critical thinking is a skill, and skills grow with deliberate practice and honest feedback. Cognificance gives every learner a patient thinking partner that asks rather than tells, and gives every educator evidence of how a student thinks, not just whether the final answer was right. The aim is lasting growth in thinking skills: weighing evidence, spotting assumptions, building arguments and changing one's mind for good reasons.

Why institutions choose it

Built for the whole institution

Leadership

Evidence of thinking at scale

Manage institutions, users and memberships from one admin portal, and give every class structured practice tagged to the standards you teach.

Institution guide

Teachers

Assign in minutes, read the reasoning

Start from the library or write your own, assign to a student or class roster, then review transcripts, scores and checkpoint timelines.

Teacher guide

Students

Practice that meets them where they are

A conversation that questions, nudges and hints when they are stuck, with reports and progress that show their thinking getting sharper.

Student guide

Features

Everything a critical-thinking program needs

Variety and library

Six challenge types and a ready-made library

Each challenge type trains a different habit of mind, from weighing evidence to ordering an argument. An extensive built-in library, filterable by subject, difficulty and age rating, means teachers can assign on day one, with more challenges and types planned.

A platform library template's read-only page showing its description, a Debate and civics subject chip, a 16+ age chip and a Clone this template button, above its version history.

Difficulty and guidance

Stretch every learner by the right amount

Challenges are rated Introductory, Intermediate or Advanced, and each run picks a support mode: Guided shows steps and offers hints, Standard hides the steps until the report, and Challenge mode removes both. When a student stalls, an "I'm stuck" hint keeps them thinking instead of giving up, within the limit the challenge sets.

The session runner with the agent's opening message for The Ferry Crossing: a harbour master, five vehicles waiting for a two-vehicle ferry and three questions to consider, above an empty response box and a Send response button.

Customizable

Your curriculum, your challenges

Clone a library challenge and adapt it, or write your own in plain fields with versioned publishing. A teacher assistant drafts and reviews alongside the teacher and saves nothing until the teacher confirms.

The new template form with the Teacher assistant panel beside it. The panel shows the teacher's request and the assistant's reply, then a Proposal card listing a title, description, type, scenario, constraints, goal and evaluation criteria, with Confirm and save and Discard buttons, and a message box with a Send button beneath.

Tracking and reporting

Reports that show the path, not just the score

A separate AI judge tracks every turn against the challenge's checkpoints. Teachers get the full transcript, an overall score, dimension scores, a written summary, a mastery band from Beginning to Mastered, and the turn each checkpoint was reached. Learner progress shows mastery by challenge type and suggests what to try next.

The Reports list with a filter panel offering institution, student, roster, assignment, template, status and start-date filters, above a search box and a grid of sessions showing student, template, status, locale, turns and start and completion times.

Trust

Safe, honest and aligned to standards

Standards alignment

Tag challenges to the frameworks you teach

Templates carry standards from a curated catalog: NGSS, Common Core ELA and Math, the C3 Framework for Social Studies, Australian Curriculum v9 Critical and Creative Thinking, Texas TEKS and Florida B.E.S.T. More frameworks are on the way.

Standards in the beta

Safety guardrails

Human review stays in the loop

A disclosure of self-harm, abuse or serious distress pauses the session and flags it to whoever set the work. Age ratings keep mature topics from younger students, and AI usage has daily limits.

Privacy policy

Academic integrity

Reasoning is the deliverable

A challenge is completed by reasoning through its checkpoints turn by turn, not by submitting a final answer, and every run keeps its transcript and checkpoint timeline as evidence for an educator's integrity review. There is no automated plagiarism detection; people make the call.

Read the full docs

How it works

From a learning goal to evidence of thought

  1. Step 1 Educator

    Configure

    Pick a library challenge or write one: goal, rules, difficulty and completion criteria.

  2. Step 2 Educator

    Assign

    A published template becomes an assignment for a student or class roster.

  3. Step 3 Student and agent

    Reason

    The student works through an AI conversation that questions rather than answers.

  4. Step 4 Judge

    Review

    A separate judge tracks progress and produces the report.

Documentation

Read how it works in detail

The docs mark what is live in the beta and what is planned.

Start here

Get started

Choose your role and take the first useful action.

Reference

Challenge types

What each type asks of a student and how it is graded.

Status

Beta scope

What is live now and what is deliberately next.

Join the beta

Bring critical-thinking practice to your institution.

We are onboarding a small number of schools and colleges. Tell us about your students and goals.

Request beta access Explore the docs