🎓 Ages 15–18 · Grades 9–12 · Civics & Open Science
CommonForge
The tools that changed a whole field were built on an open commons — and every licence, every enclosure decision, quietly shapes what gets built next. Read a real situation, predict what the rule will say, then watch a deterministic engine work it out. Learn to build ON the commons, and to defend it.
Start here
Who may build on it? Every dataset, model, and tool ships with a licence — and it decides who may build on it. Predict who’s allowed for a given use, then let the engine read the rule. Licences are facts. Open vs closed Some labs publish everything openly and build on each other; some hold their work closed for a fast private payoff. Predict which produces more over the horizon — then run the dynamics. No villain, just a tradeoff. Can you check it? A claim is only as trustworthy as your ability to verify it. Predict whether a stranger could independently check each claim, then walk the provenance: are the methods published? is the data reachable? Concept practice 16 kits from licence fundamentals to CC0/CC-BY/NC/share-alike, permissive code, provenance, reproducibility, the commons, enclosure, and real cases (PDB, AlphaFold, open weights).
Concept kits — 16 kits of licences, open science & provenance
Kit 1: What a license IS 25 questions Kit 2: Public domain and CC0 — build freely 25 questions Kit 3: CC BY — attribution required 25 questions Kit 4: Non-commercial (CC BY-NC) 25 questions Kit 5: Share-alike / copyleft 25 questions Kit 6: Permissive code licenses (MIT / BSD / Apache-2.0) 25 questions Kit 7: Proprietary — no weights, no methods, no reuse 25 questions Kit 8: Provenance — where did the data come from? 25 questions Kit 9: Reproducibility — who can check? 25 questions Kit 10: Blind assessment vs self-reported benchmarks 25 questions Kit 11: The commons — public goods that compound 25 questions Kit 12: Enclosure — open to restricted to proprietary 25 questions Kit 13: Data scarcity — why the recipe went closed 25 questions Kit 14: Who bears the cost, who reaps the value 25 questions Kit 15: Real cases — open foundations and enclosed models 25 questions Kit 16: Capstone — reason about a full case 25 questions
Meet the cast — then teach one
- The Curator — keeps the shared shelf — curates, attributes, and asks for things back (the mentor)
- Mira — publishes open — releases data so strangers can build on it
- Dr. Vex — holds the recipe closed — a rational actor under scarcity, never a villain
- Sol — traces provenance — follows a model back to who made it and how
- Wren — asks “who can verify?” — demands methods and independent checks