The research corpus: 51 studies, published whole

Math Challenge published 51 studies, 168,355 words, with numbered sources and declared limitations — whole, including the passages where the evidence contradicts the product.

Figures read from the repository on: 2026-07-31

The corpus in numbers

Studies

51

Words

168,355

External links

838

Distinct domains

369

[unverified] marks

17

Themes

5

Every number here is counted at build time by reading the research folder in the repository. None is typed into a translation file, so none can quietly go stale. Two precisions, because similar commands give different answers. Listing every Markdown file in that folder returns 53, not 51: it counts the index, which is not a study. And this page counts words the way wc -w does, markup included, while each study page counts the text with the Markdown stripped — 9 fewer across the whole corpus.

How each study is built

All 51 have the same shape, and that was checked rather than assumed: an executive summary in Spanish and one in English, numbered findings with their citations, and design implications at the end. Together they carry 838 external links to 369 distinct domains.

The studies themselves are not translated

This index exists in seven locales; the corpus does not. 47 of the documents are written in English and 4 in Spanish, and each opens with an executive summary in both. Claiming a translated corpus would be the first false statement on a site whose argument is that it makes none.

Why the studies that contradict the product are published too

Publishing only the research that agrees with you is marketing with footnotes. What makes a corpus worth reading is the part that cost something, and several of these studies argued the owner out of what he had asked for. Those passages go out whole, at the same size as everything else.

• The original brief asked for the product to be as addictive as possible. Study mc-17 catalogued the engagement mechanics that carry real regulatory exposure, and what came out of it is a blacklist naming them one by one: no purchasable currency, no paid random rewards, no hearts that lock a child out of practising.
• The owner asked for gRPC by name. Study mc-47 found three independent reasons it cannot work here — Workers cannot make outbound gRPC calls, the browser does not speak the protocol, HTTP trailers are barely supported at the edge — and any one of them was enough. It was dropped.
• The global leaderboard sorts by points. Studies mc-18 and mc-44 both recommend sorting by estimated ability instead, and mc-18 warns that adding up points rewards whoever solves many easy items quickly. The decision goes against them anyway, says so in its own text, and records the condition for revisiting it.
• The screen-time table looks like science and mostly is not. Study mc-26 found that past the age of five no authority publishes a figure at all, so the rest of that table is labelled as our judgement rather than as evidence.

None of this is confession. A claim you can check is worth more than one you cannot, and publishing the ones that went against us, at the same size as the rest, is what makes the rest checkable.

What [unverified] means

17 claims carry an explicit [unverified] mark, all of them inside 2 of the 51 studies, and 13 studies use the word somewhere without the brackets. The mark means one thing: the agent that wrote the line could not reach a primary source. Several government sites block automated fetching, so some legal statements could not be checked at all. They stay in the text, marked, instead of being quietly deleted.

None of those passages is legal advice, and none can be a basis for compliance without a lawyer. That warning is written inside the documents, not bolted on afterwards.

How the research was actually done

The session's web-search quota ran out halfway through. The agents that followed fetched primary sources directly — MDN, WebKit, W3C, EUR-Lex, pricing pages, paper PDFs — and used a plain HTML search endpoint. Every document declares its own limitations at the end. This paragraph is uncomfortable, and it is the reason the marks above are believable.

Math Challenge research corpus

51 studies on mathematics education, child privacy, gamification and platform engineering, dated 2026-07-31 and published in full, under the AGPL-3.0, in the project's public repository.

Each title opens the full study on this site. The same file, unedited, is in the public repository: the site reads it and keeps no copy of it.

Check it yourself

Clone the repository and run these. Every figure here comes out of one of them at build time; none was written from memory.

The 51 studies

ls docs/research/2026-07-31-mc-*.md | wc -l

The 168,355 words

cat docs/research/2026-07-31-mc-*.md | wc -w

The 17 bracketed marks

grep -o "\[unverified\]" docs/research/2026-07-31-mc-*.md | wc -l

That all 51 carry a numbered sources section

grep -l "^## Sources" docs/research/2026-07-31-mc-*.md | wc -l

The licence: AGPL-3.0

gh repo view kilowatto/math-challenge --json licenseInfo

What is not here yet

• There is no search box and no filter. {docs} studies fit in one list, and a page that works with JavaScript off is worth more than a filter that does not.
• The bodies are not translated. Only this index exists in seven locales.
• The corpus is dated {fecha} and has not been revised since. It is not peer-reviewed, and it was produced with AI assistance under human direction — which is why every document names its own limits.

The whole corpus, unedited, lives in the public repository: the research folder on GitHub