Artifacts
A Tidepool Pod holds itself up like a tensegrity structure: no one carries it all. These are the pieces that do the carrying, so the people inside a pod can show up as themselves.
PIO
Before any math happens, everyone shares a PIO: how I learn, what I need, what I bring.
It travels with you from pod to pod, so you never have to explain yourself from scratch, and the people around you can meet you where you are.
Fill in or print your PIO →Roles
Everyone in a pod holds one role for a whole session. Each role asks one question, does one job, and keeps one constraint, so no one has to carry it all. Each role has its own card, printable or digital, so everyone has their role in front of them to refer to as they go.
The roles rotate in a set sequence: Anemone → Urchin → Hermit Crab → Tide Watcher, and back to Anemone. At the close, each person hands their card to the next.
- 1 of 4
Anemone, the Noticer
“What is here?”
- Job
- Names what is present, such as claims, assumptions, patterns, and who is speaking.
- Constraint
- Describes, and does not interpret or fix.
- Danger without it
- The pod argues about things nobody has looked at.
- 2 of 4
Urchin, the Presser
“What is missing, and what breaks?”
- Job
- Names who and what is absent, and tests ideas with counterexamples and edge cases.
- Constraint
- Presses the idea, never the person, and asks without ruling on the answer.
- Danger without it
- What is absent stays absent.
- 3 of 4
Hermit Crab, the Keeper
“What changed, and what can we reuse?”
- Job
- Records how thinking moved, and keeps failed attempts as raw material for the next shell.
- Constraint
- Keeps everything and ranks nothing. Names growth without naming who “was wrong.”
- Danger without it
- Growth goes unwitnessed and failures are lost.
- 4 of 4
Tide Watcher
“Is it high tide or low?”
- Job
- Watches the whole pod and takes notes. Calls high tide (gather, widen, scale up and out) or low tide (a quiet beat, then narrow, focus, scale down). Starts the closing handoff.
- Constraint
- Calls the mode, never the content, and never judges people or ideas. The notes belong to the group and are shared with JoyBot.
- Danger without it
- The pod doesn’t notice it is stuck in one mode.
Three rules for everyone
- One role, one question.
- A quiet beat before sharing, in any form.
- You can always pass or ask someone else to share your thinking for you.
Blank card for new roles
Question, job, constraint, and danger without it. A new role needs all four.
Protocols
Protocols carry the plan, so you can show up fully without preparing ahead. Each pod uses existing protocols to notice, wonder, question, mathematize and revise together.
Flip through the protocol Rolodex to see how a session can run, and who holds which role.
Mathfolio
As a pod notices, wonders, questions, mathematizes and revises together, it builds a record of real thinking. A Mathfolio is the option to gather your part of that record into something that is yours.
Not a grade book. A map of where your thinking has been.
JoyBot
JoyBot is a helper AI that isn't connected to the internet. It's fully coded and self-contained, with the potential to take on updates, so you can use it comfortably without worrying that it will go rogue.
It's there to help you understand how to carry out your role, how to work with others in your learning pod, and what a mathematical word or idea means when you need it clarified.
JoyBot is still in early design, so exactly what it will hold, perhaps a full dictionary or an offline copy of Wikipedia, is still taking shape.