Cal’s patience is infinite, and so is his availability. Lessons can happen whenever and wherever you want — all you need is an internet connection. You may have heard it said that there is no such thing as a dumb question? With Cal, that is the truth. If your child learns better by having things explained to them multiple times in slightly different ways, that is what Cal will do. What Cal won’t do is complete your child’s homework or assignments for them. His system prompt contains a strict academic integrity protocol that prevents him from completing even small sections of a student’s work for them.

Patience is infinite, but praise must be earned. Cal’s anti-sycophancy protocol will prevent him from engaging in flattery to keep your child engaged — this is a persistent problem with generic chatbots. Cal will offer frequent encouragement, but reserve high praise for students demonstrating mastery of key concepts.

Personalized Instruction — once a student has enrolled, the answers on their registration form will provide Cal with crucial information that he can use to customize his teaching methods to their needs and interests. Cal will know what sports, hobbies, and leisure activities interest a student, and he will use them when he creates teaching examples and analogies. He will also know the student’s specific course-load, as well as their preferred learning styles. He will know what program or occupation they wish to pursue after high school, and he will use this to motivate and teach during lessons.

Pedagogical agility — perhaps Cal’s greatest teaching asset. He is trained in 9 separate signature pedagogies, and he will switch teaching modes when he senses that a student is getting frustrated. If a student is not responding to Socratic questioning, he may ask if they would like to play a game, or place them in the middle of a role-playing adventure where solving problems is the only way to advance the narrative. If they just want a straight forward explanation, all they have to do is ask, and Cal will revert to traditional direct instruction using worked examples. Techniques like error analysis and teacher-student role reversal make highly effective test review strategies. If a student needs to see things, Cal will create concept maps and employ dual coding strategies.

Neuro-Inclusive Learning — Cal utilizes specific pedagogical protocols to support students with a wide range of learning differences. By uploading a learning profile document like an IEP to the knowledge base (with all identifying information redacted), you can ensure that Cal has the information he needs to use the right teaching methods with your child. This capability requires an Undergrad or Graduate level subscription.

Multilingual Support — Cal can provide support in over 100 languages, and he is fluent in the following: English, French, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi, Arabic, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Japanese. (In these, Cal can act as a native tutor).

Federated RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) — this means that Cal relies on a vast and carefully curated KB (knowledge base) of OER textbooks and curriculum documents for his subject expertise and pedagogical agility. He is ready to support students taking OME courses, and IB/AP/out-of-province students can upload their course documents to their own personal KB to get expert support in those programs as well. Cal is extremely unlikely to hallucinate responses to subject-based inquiries.

Students subscribed to the Undergrad or Graduate tiers have the ability to upload course documents to a personalized KB (knowledge base) that is there to store their Dean’s Reports, course syllabus documents, major assignment guidelines, test and exam review sheets, and other similar documents. They can even upload sections of their textbook to help Cal understand how their specific teacher wants certain questions answered. Uploading these documents gives Cal the ability to personalize instruction for the specific demands of the course they are taking, as well as their unique learning preferences.

Mathpix — the industry gold standard for rendering difficult formulas and symbols in clean, easy to read LaTeX format. All student uploads are processed using Mathpix, and this means that students can upload their hand-written tests and assignments, and Cal can read them and give them detailed feedback on their answers. Mathpix also takes the tables and columns in most humanities textbooks, and turns them into a format (markdown) that Cal can read and explain to a student.

Privacy — although Cal will know a great deal about the way a student learns, the only thing he will know about their identity is their first name. In the era of data-harvesting, your child’s academic journey with Cal is a closed circuit. Unlike public AI tools, Cal is an enclosed environment designed for privacy. Because we pay for enterprise API keys with our LLM service providers, teaching sessions can never be used for LLM pre-training data, or for any other commercial purpose. All student data is stored in Canada in the Supabase database in Montreal, in full compliance with Canadian data sovereignty requirements, and out of the reach of the US CLOUD ACT.

Safety — all messages sent to Cal are filtered through the OpenAI safety moderation protocol, which will flag any message that expresses an intent to harm, and send an immediate warning to the parent’s email address.

Memory — at the Undergrad subscription tier, students can upload important course documents like their IB or AP course guides, syllabus documents, assignment guidelines, and exam review sheets. This allows Cal to offer strategic guidance on academic success, in addition to daily lessons. At the Graduate subscription tier, Cal receives a weekly update from a student’s Dean’s Report, creating a Living Profile. This access allows him to remember previous lessons and build on successful teaching strategies. These memories persist for as long as the student learns with Cal.