School leaders keep asking us the same question about classroom edtech: why should kids
stare at a screen for this?
It's the right question. Most of edtech is doubling down on the same pattern — one student, one
screen, an AI tutor pulling them into a private conversation. Kids are already isolated by their
devices. Another wall between them and their classmates is the last thing schools need.
OKO is an AI-powered small-group math platform for grades 3–10. Students work through high-quality content aligned to their curriculum, exactly where each group needs to be — defending
their thinking, hearing other approaches, and building the durable human skills the rest of school often leaves on the table: collaboration, communication, and critical thinking. AI facilitates each group; one teacher can run multiple groups at once.
Groups of two to five students sit together at a small-group table. They start with a couple minutes of solo work on a math problem. Then their screens connect them as a group, and OKO speaks up:
Looks like you have two different answers in your group! Now discuss and see if you can figure out the right approach. Who wants to share first?
From there, the conversation gets going — students explaining, disagreeing, sketching on whiteboards or scratch paper, working with manipulatives, looking each other in the eye. OKO listens in the background. It nudges the quieter student to join in — "I haven't heard from Jamal yet…" — asks the student racing ahead to slow down and explain, and surfaces a hint only when the group is genuinely stuck.
Most of the session is kids talking to kids. The app is the scaffolding that helps the talk happen.
of students grew in Geometry
Source: Year-long deployment at Kindezi Schools, Atlanta.
collaboration & discourse gains
Source: First 60 days of an active RCT in Hamilton County, TN. Funded by Gates and Accelerate.
DJ Hartigan — Co-Founder, Kindle Education · Jersey City
A screen earns its place when it makes the room more human, not less — when kids look up from it more than they look down at it. That's the bar we set for OKO, and it's the bar we hold ourselves to every week.
