Privacy
Experimental Design · Science Olympiad · Division B
This is a practice app for Science Olympiad Experimental Design clubs. It is not a public service: sign-in is limited to a roster that a club admin manages, and nothing in the app is visible without signing in. The homepage is the one public page besides this one and the terms. It describes the app and carries a waitlist form for coaches at other clubs.
Who runs this
Your club's coaches run this app as volunteers. There is no company behind it. One of them is the admin, and they are the only person who can add someone to the roster, change an account, or remove one.
What we store
- Your name, email address and role (student, coach or admin), added by your club's admin when you join the roster.
- Which team you belong to.
- A Discord user id and two notice switches (email, Discord), set by your club's admin, so the app knows where to reach you.
- Scans of the practice tests your team writes.
- The scores and written feedback graders enter.
- The practice plan a coach builds each week: which group each student is placed in, who is picked as a student coach, and the coach's own notes. Students never see a plan, not even their own team's.
- A log of app activity (uploads, assignments, submissions) so coaches can see what is still to grade each week.
- When you use Report a problem, what you type goes out by email along with the page you were on, your name, your email address, your role, and two technical details your browser reports: the size of your window and the browser you are using.
- That email also carries a picture of the page as it looked to you, drawn by your own browser when you pressed the button. Whatever was on screen is in it, including another student's work if you were reading it.
A problem report goes to privacy@experimental-design.com and is not saved in the app's database. The email is the whole record.
Sign-in runs through Google. We never see or store your password.
The waitlist
If you join the waitlist on the homepage, you leave a name and an email address, and you can add a school or club name, your role, division, state, number of teams and a note. It's stored in the app's database, where only David Martin, the coach who built the app, can read it, and a copy is emailed to privacy@experimental-design.com. It's used only to write to you about the app and is never shared. The form never emails the address you enter. To come off the list, email privacy@experimental-design.com.
Where it lives
The database and files are hosted on Supabase and the site is served by Vercel, over HTTPS. Test scans sit in a private bucket. A scan opens through a temporary link the app makes for you while you are signed in, and that link stops working after a few minutes.
Who can see what
Students see their own team's tests, the tests assigned to their team for grading, their club's library of past tests, and the scores and feedback their team has been given. Scores and feedback stay hidden until every grading team has finished and the team has handed in its own grading. A coach can open them sooner. Coaches and admins see everything the app stores: every team's tests, every score and every comment. Nobody outside a club's roster sees its work.
AI feedback
Every test you upload goes to Anthropic's Claude, an AI service, when its pages land. It does two things: it reads the pages to work out which page holds which section, and it writes one extra practice scorecard when your club's admin has that switched on. That scorecard sits beside the peer and coach scorecards and is always labelled as the AI's. Nothing else about you is sent with the pages.
Notifications
The app can post to your club's Discord channel and email you at a few moments: when a coach opens grading on a test date (one email listing the tests you grade, one post naming the grading teams), when your team has finished its grading for the date (a post naming your team), when the scores for the date are all in (one email to you about your own test, one post naming the teams), and as a reminder two or three days after grading opens if a scorecard of yours is still open. One of those can tag you by name in the channel: when grading opens. The other posts name teams, not you. An admin chooses which of these are on, and you can turn the emails to you off on the Notices page. None of these messages include the test pages themselves.
What we don't do
No ads, no analytics trackers, no selling or sharing of data. Everything above exists to run one thing: the weekly round of tests, grading and feedback.
How long we keep it
We keep a club's tests, scores and feedback for five years after the end of the season they were written in. After that we delete them. Five years so a student can look back across their whole time in the club, and so later students can learn from strong work.
Removing your data
Ask your club's admin, or email privacy@experimental-design.com, and we will remove the account and its work. Many club members are under 13; parents are welcome to use the same address for any question about their student's data.