A plain description of what the Aotearoa Number Trail captures, where it goes, and how long it is kept. Written for the adult who set this up. Last reviewed 31 August 2026.
The short version. The site records how your child works — which stop, which kind of task, how long, right or wrong, how many hints — and the short answer they gave. It does not record their voice. While the site is being built it DOES keep a written transcript of what is said to Piko and what Piko says back, so the person building it can improve the trail; a bar on the screen says so whenever that is happening. The learning records are deleted automatically after seven days, and the transcripts after thirty. Talking to the bird sends live audio to two outside companies while the conversation is happening.
Each event is a small fixed record. There is no free-text field for anything a child says, and no field for a name. These are all of them:
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
t | The time the event happened. |
lrn | Which learner the site is configured for. Set by the adult, not by the child. |
ev | What happened, from a fixed list: started, finished, asked for a hint, asked for it read aloud, checked an answer, flew to a stop, answered, changed an answer, paused, parked a question, and a few others. |
stop, task | Which stop on the trail and which question. |
level | How deep a hint was needed: 1, 2 or 3. |
ms, lat | How long was spent on a question, and how long before an answer came. |
ok | Whether the answer was right. |
node, shadow_move | Which idea a question belongs to, and what the trail would have chosen to do next. Recorded while the trail does nothing differently, so that a grown-up can check the choices it would make before it makes any. Both are fixed short labels, never sentences. |
input_mode | Whether the answer was typed or spoken. Recorded so that a summary can tell the two apart; it holds no words either way. |
type | The kind of question: a table, a fill-in, a choice, a column sum, an ordering, a number line, a bar graph, an array, a written answer, a shaded region, a solid shape, a turn, a clock, a scale, a symmetry task, a grid map, or a ten-frame. |
verdict | Whether the two listening engines agreed on what was said. |
channel | Whether the microphone picked up speech at all, and whether anything came back from it. One of six fixed words: speech was heard and a transcript came back; speech was heard but no transcript came back; speech was heard and nothing came back at all; speech was heard while Piko was still talking; no speech and the microphone is working; the microphone has stopped. It records only whether sound arrived, never what was said, and Piko does not act on it. |
val, want | The answer given, and the answer expected. Both cut off at 24 characters. |
corr | How many times an answer was corrected mid-sentence. |
mis | A short label for the kind of mistake, such as place_value_confusion. Letters, digits and underscores only, 32 characters at most. |
sid | A random string generated fresh each time the page loads. It groups one sitting together. It is not tied to a person, a device or a login, and it is different tomorrow. |
One honest exception, because it is the answer field. val stores what your child put in the answer box. It is meant for numbers. If they type their own name, or anything else, into an answer box, that text is stored like any other answer, up to 24 characters. It is deleted on the same seven-day clock as everything else.
Three outside companies are involved, and only while your child is using the site.
| Who | What is sent | When |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI Realtime voice | Live microphone audio, for the conversation with the bird, and for turning speech into text. | Only while the voice button is on. The site holds no recording afterwards. |
| Google Gemini | A few seconds of the same audio, as a second opinion on what was said. | Only when an answer is being spoken into a box. This is why the bird can say "I heard two things — which was it?" instead of guessing. |
| Cerebras teacher model | The question, the learning goal, the correct answer, and the wrong answer given. No audio, and no name. If the answer was spoken and the two listening engines heard it differently, both versions of that answer are included, so the model can tell a mishearing from a misunderstanding. | Only after a wrong answer, to work out what the thinking behind it was. |
The site is hosted on Cloudflare, which stores the records above and serves the pages. Each of these companies has its own handling and retention terms for what reaches it, which this site does not control.
Every record is written with a seven-day expiry and is removed by the storage system when that expires. This is not a policy someone has to remember to apply; it is set on each record as it is written, so nothing accumulates and there is no archive building up in the background.
Your child's answers as they appear on the page are also saved in the browser on the device itself, so the trail is still there next time. That copy stays on the device and is cleared by clearing the browser's site data.
Two different secrets, because doing the work and reading the record are different acts. Your child types a short code to start. That code tells the site whose trail to load and whose work to save — nothing else. It does not open the record of that work. A summary of how your child is getting on is available at /api/learner and needs a separate, long key held only by the adult who set the site up. Without that key the address returns nothing, whatever code is presented. Where two children use the site, each adult key opens only that child's records, and the coaching notes the bird is given before a session are drawn only from the same child's records.
What the short code is not. It is a nametag, not a password. It is five digits, typed where other people can see it, and a child who learns the other child's code could use it and would then be treated as that child — same trail, same saved work, same coaching notes. It is there so the wrong trail does not load by accident on a shared device. It is not there to keep a determined child out, and it is not strong enough to. The adult key is the one that protects the record.
Ask the adult who set this site up — deleting the record takes the same adult key that reads it, so it is their key, not your child's code, that does this. They can clear the stored records, and can turn off the voice features entirely, in which case no audio leaves the device at all and the site works as an ordinary written maths trail. If nothing is done, everything recorded is gone within seven days regardless.
?piko=off to the page address turns the voice guide off completely for that visit.?ears=1 uses only the first listening engine, so no audio is sent to Google.