← STEMBuddy

The 5-step Investigation method

Start to finish, your kid picks a question they care about, runs a fair test to answer it, and writes up what they found — in their own words. The five steps below are the path that gets them there, and the artifact at the end is a Field Report they can explain and defend.

Three things make STEMBuddy different

WonderMap

Kids decompose a fuzzy research question into branches — “What if…”, “Compare”, “Measure” — until a vague wonder becomes a testable handful of small questions.

Discovery Chain

Each tap reveals the next link in the kid's reasoning. “Less light might slow growth…” → “So the plant may stay shorter.” Cause and effect, visible.

Procedure that ships

A fair, repeatable plan the kid actually runs. Prepare, run the trial, capture what happened. Honest experiment habits over time.

What your kid actually does, step by step

Every investigation runs the same five steps. Each one produces something real — not a worksheet box to tick:

  1. Hypothesis. Your kid turns a big wonder into a prediction they can actually test — “if… then… because…” — and breaks it into questions small enough to chase one at a time.
  2. Procedure. They write a fair, repeatable plan: what they’ll change, what they’ll keep the same, and what they’ll measure — a test another kid could run.
  3. Collect & Analyze Data. They run it and log what really happened — measurements they can compare and patterns worth noticing — then make a claim their evidence can back.
  4. Conclusion. They explain what the evidence means and why, in their own words, with coaching that keeps their voice first — never the AI’s.
  5. Field Report. It all comes together in a signed Field Report — the question, the evidence, and the conclusion in their own words. It’s theirs to keep and print, and real-world investigations can be submitted to the public Codex.

Unbreakable Logic

Using the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning (CER) framework, we teach your child to defend their ideas with hard data, just like a real scientist.

Child's first draft:
“My plant grew big.”
Stronger version (AI suggests changes, kid edits):
“My plant grew big 3 cm taller in the sunny spot.”
Final, in the kid's voice: the child accepts or rejects each AI suggestion. The conclusion stays theirs to defend.
Questions parents ask

Before you sign your kid up.

What will my kid actually do in a session?

They pick a real question to investigate, make a prediction, run a fair test (or a guided simulation while they’re still learning the moves), record what happens, and write a short Field Report explaining their conclusion. Sessions are bite-sized — one or two steps of the loop — so the work is short enough to finish and real enough to be proud of.

How does my kid get started?

You create a free, parent-verified account and set up your child’s profile, then hand them the device. They choose their Field Companion and begin their first investigation. You stay in the loop from the Parent Hub — you can see what they’re working on and read the Field Reports they finish.

Does AI write my child’s hypothesis or conclusion for them?

No. AI scaffolds the work — offers sentence starters, suggests structure, asks clarifying questions — but your child writes the hypothesis, the procedure, the journal entries, and the conclusion themselves. The load-bearing rule of the platform is that the kid does the reasoning. AI never approves an answer the kid hasn’t written.

Is the Codex Society story the real science, or just an intro?

Both, in order. New investigators begin inside the Codex Society story — a guided arc that teaches the 5-step method through a narrative. Once they’ve learned the moves, they run their own real investigations, choosing the question and collecting the data themselves. The story teaches the method; the real investigations are the point.

What is the Codex Society?

The Codex Society is the fictional frame around the platform — a multi-generational field-research institution recruiting young investigators. It drives engagement (a story kids want to come back to) while the underlying science investigations remain real, unscaffolded work. Story is the wrapper; the practice is the point.

What ages is STEMBuddy designed for?

Ages 8 to 12. Content scales with the kid — younger investigators get more scaffolding on each step; older ones get more open-ended prompts and more demanding evidence standards.

Is STEMBuddy safe and COPPA compliant?

Yes. STEMBuddy is built to comply with COPPA, is ad-free, and uses parent-verified accounts. There is no public kid feed, no comments, no kid-to-kid messaging. Every Codex submission is editor-reviewed before it appears in the public archive.