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Privacy Policy

Tobin Science is built by a practicing classroom teacher, and protecting student privacy comes first. Our tools collect as little data as they can, and this page says exactly what each one stores, in plain language. It applies to tobinscience.com and quest.tobinscience.com and every product on them.

The short version

• Students never create accounts. Where a product needs to know who a student is, the student uses a code or class link handed out by their teacher. No student ever enters an email address or creates a password in any product.
• Most of our products store no student information at all on our servers. Two classroom products, The Den and Science Rivals, do store limited student information so that a teacher's class can play together. Each is described in full below.
• We use no advertising networks and no analytics trackers. We do not sell, rent, trade, or share personal information with anyone for marketing.
• Class data is used for one thing only: running the class the teacher set up.

Products that store no student data on our servers

Review Quest

• A student types a first and last name and class period so their teacher can recognize their work. That information is saved only in the student's own browser (so progress is remembered) and inside the reward code the student sends directly to their own teacher. The unit pages make no network requests to us at all; nothing a student types is transmitted to or stored on our servers.
• When a teacher pastes reward codes into their dashboard's Insight panel, the codes are decoded entirely inside the teacher's browser, and the results are saved only on the teacher's own device.
• If a teacher also subscribes to The Den and a student redeems a Review Quest reward code there, the name sealed inside that code is handled as described under The Den below.

Science Hub and Math Hub

• Students use the lessons, quizzes, and games with no login. Quiz scores and game progress are saved locally in the student's browser, not on our servers.
• Teacher accounts and subscriptions are described under "Teacher accounts" below. The Hubs also have their own terms and privacy page, which is consistent with this one.

Science Quest

• Students play using a reusable access code handed out by their teacher. Entering the code records only the date it was first used. We do not collect student names, emails, scores, or progress; the Hall of Champions is a page inside the game and does not send anything to us.
• A teacher may optionally label a code with a student's name inside their own dashboard so they can track who has which code. That label is typed by the teacher, is visible only to that teacher, and is erased when the teacher uses "Reset for new year."

1v1 Science games

• The games are self-contained files that run in the browser. No student information is collected, and playing a game sends nothing to us.
• Purchase records live only with our payment processor, Stripe. The free district pass for Cherokee County teachers is a signed link sent to the teacher's school email; no account is created.

Free practice pages and classroom tools

The free practice pages, Class Manager, and similar tools store any information locally in the browser of the device using them. That data stays on the device, is never transmitted to us, and is cleared when the user clears it.

Products that store limited student data

The Den (classroom subscription)

The Den is a classroom economy game run by a subscribing teacher. To make a class work, we store the following for each student, and use it only to run that teacher's class:

• Name and class period, entered by the teacher from their roster. Real names are shown only to that teacher, never to other students.
• A 4-digit PIN the student chooses to claim their character. It is stored as a salted hash; the actual PIN is never stored.
• A nickname the student chooses (subject to teacher approval) and their avatar and gear. Only the approved nickname and avatar are visible to classmates.
• Game activity: class-currency balance and transaction history, items owned, the practice questions a student was asked and the answers they chose, results and response times, streaks, trophies, and a fair-play flag if an answer came in impossibly fast. Teachers see this so they can run the class.
• The time of last activity, so the teacher can see who has been playing.
• If a student redeems a Review Quest or Study Quest reward code that does not match the roster, the name, period, and total sealed inside that code are held in the teacher's approval queue until the teacher accepts or rejects it.

Students join with a claim code from their teacher and choose their PIN. There is no student account, email, or password. The Den uses one cookie, described under "Cookies" below. A teacher who uploads a school mascot image should know it is stored in a public image folder, because it appears on gear that every student in the class sees.

Science Rivals (class vs. class competitions)

Science Rivals is a private, invitation-only competition between classes. Students join by typing a class code from their teacher; there is no account. For each student who joins, we store:

• The first name and last initial the student types when joining.
• For each round, the questions shown, the answers the student chose, their score, when they started and finished, and a fair-play flag if a round was finished impossibly fast.
• A random identifier saved in the student's browser, used only to stop the same name being joined from a second device.

Individual results are visible only to that student's own teacher. Public scoreboards show class totals only, never individual students. Teachers are identified by school, name, and period; no teacher email or password is stored for Rivals.

Teacher accounts and purchases

• Science Quest, Review Quest, and The Den use no passwords. We store the teacher's email address, what they purchased, and the display settings they type in (their name, school, and class-currency name). A private dashboard link, sent by email, is the login.
• Science Hub and Math Hub teachers create an account with an email address and password. Passwords are handled by Supabase Auth and are never visible to us. We store the email, trial dates, and subscription status.
• Stripe processes every payment. We never see or store card numbers. Stripe sends receipts and may email you about your subscription.
• We send account emails (dashboard links, receipts of access, trial confirmations) through Resend, an email delivery service.

The contact form

If you write to us through the contact form, we keep the message and the name, email, and page you chose to include, and a copy is emailed to our support inbox. We use it only to reply to you.

Cookies, local storage, and logs

• We set exactly one cookie: The Den's sign-in cookie, which keeps a student's character signed in on that device for up to 180 days. It contains only a random character ID.
• Everything else that needs to be remembered (progress, saved codes, a teacher's decoded results) lives in the browser's local storage on that device and is never sent to us.
• Our store pages keep an anonymous count of page views and the site a visitor came from. No cookies, no IP addresses, no device details, and nothing that identifies a person.
• Our hosting providers (Vercel, GitHub Pages, and Supabase) keep standard short-term server logs, as every website's hosts do. We do not build any tracking on top of them.

Services we rely on

Service	What it does for us
Supabase	Database and secure file storage for teacher accounts, purchases, and the Den and Rivals class data described above
Stripe	Payments and subscriptions
Resend	Sends our account emails
Vercel and GitHub Pages	Host the site
YouTube	Hosts embedded videos on some pages; YouTube's own privacy policy applies while a video plays. Where possible we use YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed, which sets no cookies until you press play.
Google Fonts and jsDelivr	The Science Hub and Math Hub pages load fonts and one code library from these content networks, which see the request like any web server would
PhET Interactive Simulations, Chrome Music Lab	Some lessons link out to these free simulations. They open in a new tab under their own privacy policies; nothing about you is passed to them.

What we don't do

• We do not sell, rent, or trade personal information.
• We do not use advertising networks or third-party analytics.
• We do not share data with third parties for marketing, and we do not use student information for any purpose other than running the class the teacher set up.
• We do not collect student email addresses, photos, locations, or contacts in any product.

Children's privacy, FERPA, and COPPA

Most of our products collect no student information at all, so there is nothing to protect. For The Den and Science Rivals, the information described above is entered by, or at the direction of, the student's teacher for a classroom activity, and we use it solely to run that activity. We do not use it for marketing and we do not disclose it to anyone except the teacher who runs the class. Teachers are responsible for following their own school or district policies when using these products with students.

How long we keep it

Teacher accounts and purchase records are kept so that teachers keep the access they paid for. Den and Rivals class data is kept so a teacher can return to their class from year to year; we do not currently have an automated deletion schedule. Science Quest code labels are cleared by the teacher with "Reset for new year" in their dashboard. Everything stored only in a browser is cleared whenever the user clears it.

Questions

Questions about this policy can go to sciencehubchalkbox@gmail.com or the contact form. Technical requirements for Review Quest are listed at tobinscience.com/review-quest-requirements.html. Our Terms of Use are separate.