Everything you need to know to get the most from Noēs — for each person who uses it.
Before your child uses Noēs for the first time, read the opening paragraph with them — the one from Aby. It is short. It tells them honestly what is about to happen and why. Children who hear it tend to arrive at the first session less anxious than those who do not.
Then, leave the room.
This is not a slight. The research is clear: parents who are present during mathematics learning transmit their own anxiety about the subject, even unconsciously. The best thing you can do for your child's mathematical development is to not be in the room when they are doing it.
You receive a weekly report after sessions in which your child had a discovery moment. It has three parts.
What happened — a plain account of what the session covered. No jargon. You do not need to understand the mathematics to understand this section.
What it means — why this particular understanding matters for your child's mathematical development. What it unlocks. What it connects to.
What comes next — what Aby is planning to explore in the next session. You do not need to prepare anything. Aby will handle the sequencing.
The research optimum for spaced practice is three to four sessions per week, each between fifteen and thirty minutes. This is significantly more effective than longer, less frequent sessions. Mathematics is better learned in short, repeated encounters than in long, occasional ones.
If your child can only manage one or two sessions per week, that is fine. Something is better than nothing. But if you want results, three sessions a week for six months is the minimum meaningful commitment.
Noēs is not a replacement for you. It is a tool that does something you cannot do economically at scale: give every student unlimited one-on-one Socratic attention, available outside your sessions.
The most effective way to use Noēs alongside tutoring is to assign it before you teach a concept, not after. The research on productive failure is clear: students who attempt a problem before instruction understand it more deeply than students who are taught first. Noēs handles the exploration. You handle the consolidation.
Before each session with a student, look at their comprehension map and their Book of Understanding. These tell you two different things.
The comprehension map shows which concepts have mastery scores and how strong they are. A low score on equality after six sessions tells you the student has not had a genuine discovery there — they may have answered questions correctly without understanding the underlying structure.
The Book of Understanding tells you how the student thinks. Read their entries. The exact words a student uses to describe a mathematical idea reveal more about their conceptual model than any test result. If a student writes "the equals sign means the answer goes after it," you know precisely what to address in your next session.
Some students, especially older ones, will be frustrated that Aby does not give answers. Brief them before their first session:
Each student needs their own account. Create an account using your email and set up each student's profile under it, or have students create their own accounts and share their session history with you.
For tutoring centres or schools using Noēs at scale, contact us about the Schools tier — it includes individual parent communication tools and a unified dashboard across all students.
Noēs is designed for ages 4–16, but the Socratic method does not have an age limit. Mathematics anxiety is not a childhood condition — it persists into adulthood and affects how adults engage with numbers, probability, and reasoning in their professional and personal lives.
When you set up as an adult learner, Aby switches to her thinker mode. Her questions are more precise. Her language is more exact. She expects you to push back. She does not talk down to you.
She still will not give you the answer.
The first session is calibration. Aby is finding out how you think — not what you know. She will ask questions that seem almost too simple. Answer them honestly, including when you are uncertain. The more you tell her about your actual thinking, the more useful the subsequent sessions will be.
The second and third sessions will feel different. Aby will have a clearer model of your conceptual gaps — not your knowledge gaps, but the places where your understanding of mathematical structure is softer than you may have thought.
Many adults arrive at Noēs believing they are bad at mathematics. Most leave the first session wondering when they were told that, and why they believed it.
The constellation (the home screen) is organised around the twelve foundational ideas of mathematics — a structured progression. This is excellent for building from the ground up.
But the Agora is different. In the Agora, you bring any question. Not a school question — any question. Why does compound interest accelerate the way it does? What is the Monty Hall problem actually saying about probability? What is an imaginary number, really, and why does it exist?
The Agora is where adult curiosity about mathematics is best served. Aby will explore any question you bring her, following it wherever it leads, for as long as it takes.
Every genuine discovery you make — things you work out yourself during a session, in your own reasoning — goes into your Book of Understanding. In your own words. Not a definition. Not Aby's explanation. Your understanding, as you articulated it in the moment.
Read it back after a month. The most common reaction from adult users: surprise at how much they have changed their minds, and how solidly they understand things they previously thought were beyond them.
The book belongs to you. You can export it at any time. It is a record of how your thinking has changed — which is the only meaningful measure of learning.