A change record, in the open. The Challenges modality is canon under development: it has moved a great deal since the first rulings, and this page exists so that anyone deciding whether to take part can see what moved and why, rather than being handed the current state as though it had always been the state. This page describes changes and links to them. It is not where the rules live.
Three strands
- Foundation The foundation — the evidence discipline underneath everything we say: how each claim is recorded, how strong it is allowed to sound, and what we decided not to say at all.
- Modality The modality — the Challenges canon itself (Desafíos in its original Spanish). What makes a Challenge a Challenge, for any organizer, any edition, any country.
- Event The event — the aiLearning Challenge, the modality’s first instance. Its own calendar, its own places, its own pages. The methodology is one thing; the event that runs it is another.
The timeline
In date order, across all three strands, because the three moved against each other. Every entry names the record it came from.
- Foundation F1
What changed — The governing core was written down as the foundation's highest authority, above every layer derived from it.
Why — We decided a foundation nobody has written down cannot be departed from on purpose, only by accident.
What it replaced — An unwritten set of intentions.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md - Modality D1
What changed — Authentication of a team's own work became oral-first — a light creation record, and a live defense that gates advancement.
Why — We decided a written trail can be produced by the very tool it is meant to check; a person defending their work live cannot.
What it replaced — A document-first authentication trail.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.1.0 - Modality D2
What changed — Duration became dependent on the developmental band rather than fixed for everyone, with the judged finale always live.
Why — We decided one calendar cannot fit a young child and a university team, while the live finale is what keeps the work verifiable in every band.
What it replaced — A single duration for every band.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.4.0 - Modality D3
What changed — One theme now runs across every band, cut to each band's developmental stage.
Why — Our position is that a shared theme makes the cross-age showcase possible and lets each band meet the same problem at its own depth.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md - Modality D4
What changed — The youngest band was included rather than deferred, mediated by an adult and oriented to celebration rather than ranking.
Why — We decided that excluding the youngest to keep the format simple would have made the format's own claim about age untrue.
What it replaced — A format starting at the middle band.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.1.2 - Modality D5
What changed — The signature mechanics were adopted together, as the format's spine rather than as options.
Why — We decided they only work as a set — each one closes a gap the others open.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.1.0 - Modality D6
What changed — Judging became a multi-component profile built from a Learning Object, never a single score.
Why — Our position is that one number hides exactly what a school needs back, and averaging unlike capabilities destroys the information.
What it replaced — A single overall figure per entry.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.5.0 - Modality D7
What changed — Ethics moved inside the challenge content itself, as consequential choices rather than a separate exhibit.
Why — We decided ethics presented as its own display becomes decoration, while a choice with consequences inside the work does not.
What it replaced — Ethics as a separate presented item.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md - Modality D8
What changed — Participant intellectual property was made absolute, with open publication encouraged and never required.
Why — We decided the people who made the work own it, and that neither hosts nor sponsors acquire a claim by running or funding the occasion.
What it replaced — A shared or licensed claim over submitted work.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md - Modality D9
What changed — Solo participation became its own division, judged separately.
Why — We decided a solo participante and a team are not doing the same thing, so comparing them would be unfair in whichever direction it fell.
What it replaced — Solo entrants mixed into the team division.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md - Modality D10
What changed — The event was declared to be research as well, with consent workflows required and experiments confined to practice contexts.
Why — We decided that if we are going to learn from what happens, we say so in advance and ask permission, rather than studying people quietly.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md - Modality D11
What changed — The event's name was fixed and made invariant across languages.
Why — We decided a name translated per locale stops being a name.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.7.0 - Modality D12
What changed — The first edition was made global from the start rather than a single-country pilot, with local reframing mandatory.
Why — Our position is that a format authored centrally and never reframed locally extracts from the places it visits.
What it replaced — A single-country pilot.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.1.0 - Modality D13
What changed — The initiative was declared an event applying canon rather than a methodology extending it.
Why — We decided an instance must not quietly become the rule, because then nobody else can run the format differently.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.1.2 - Modality D14
What changed — One Learning Object was fixed for the Challenge itself, stable across editions and across bands.
Why — We decided the capability being developed is the constant and the theme is only its vehicle, so forking the object per band would fork the thing being learned.
What it replaced — A separate object per band.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.1.2 - Modality D15
What changed — Recognition was split into three layers, none of them a single score.
Why — We decided recognition that collapses into one ranking discards the profile the judging was built to produce.
What it replaced — A single ranked outcome.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.1.2 - Event E1
What changed — The announcement was published, in English, Spanish and French, derived from the modality canon as it then stood — and revised three more times the same day: expanded, renamed to the ruled event name with a photographic hero, and consolidated.
What it replaced — Nothing public: this was the first surface.
Recorded in —
src/pages/challenge/about/ — fdea9e7 · 5b464dc · 15452fa · f726f71· Source: this site’s page history · See the page → - Foundation F2
What changed — The evidence base became a claim-level ledger: one row per claim, each with its strength, its honesty label and a permitted wording that may be shortened and never strengthened.
Why — We decided a bibliography lets a page say more than its sources do, while a row per claim does not.
What it replaced — Citations gathered in research digests.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/50-evidence/evidence-ledger.yaml - Event E2
What changed — The event moved to a shorter route and gained an interactive landing page; the full announcement brief moved to its own page underneath it, and the old route redirects.
Why — We decided the door should be one word long, and that the brief and the landing are two different things to read.
What it replaced — A single long announcement page at the original route.
Recorded in —
src/pages/challenge/ — d0eabd3 · 7650a37 (astro.config.mjs redirects)· Source: this site’s page history · See the page → - Event E3
What changed — Three surfaces went live in one day: the pedagogical foundation page, the challenge-draft generator for educators, and the rehearsal kit built for the next day’s in-person rehearsal.
Recorded in —
src/pages/challenge/foundation/ · src/pages/challenge/generator/ · src/pages/challenge/demo/ — 909ef8b · 2063246· Source: this site’s page history · See the page → - Event E4
What changed — The in-person rehearsal ran, in the Dominican Republic: four teams of five educators, one session, run with the rehearsal kit. Formally a Challenge Gym session. What we observed in it is recorded on the lessons page, in the register that page exists for; nothing from it is restated here.
Recorded in —
docs/challenge/event-record.md §4 — Event history· Source: this site’s event record · See the page → - Event E5
What changed — A lessons page was published the same evening, carrying the rehearsal’s six findings as findings — observations without dispositions, because none had yet been ruled.
Why — We decided that a format claiming to be honest about evidence owed the public its own evolution, and that waiting for the rulings would have meant publishing the corrections without the record of what prompted them.
Recorded in —
src/pages/challenge/lessons/ — 6a426ae· Source: this site’s page history · See the page → - Event E6
What changed — The foundation page received its first correction pass against the evidence tiers: claims not cleared for a public page were removed by citation.
Recorded in —
src/pages/challenge/foundation/ — b018d4b· Source: this site’s page history · See the page → - Foundation F3
What changed — A register of rejected claims was adjudicated and now stands, each rejection carrying its reframe where one exists.
Why — We decided what we declined to say is part of the foundation, and that a register is what stops a rejected claim returning under a new name.
What it replaced — Quiet omission.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/50-evidence/rejected-claims.md - Modality D16
What changed — Thirteen proposed rejections were adjudicated and stand, each with its reframe where one exists, and one of them as an outright prohibition.
Why — We decided what we will not say has to be written down, or it re-enters later under a new name.
What it replaced — Quiet omission of claims we had declined.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.4.0 - Modality D17
What changed — The event's brand casing was ruled, and the other form corrected wherever it appeared.
Why — We decided a name with two spellings in circulation is two names.
What it replaced — A second casing in circulation.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.4.0 - Modality D18
What changed — The middle band's duration was placed closer to the upper bands than to the youngest, closing a hole the duration ruling had left.
Why — We decided the earlier ruling had named the ends of the range and left the middle to be guessed at.
What it replaced — An unstated middle-band duration.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.4.0 - Modality D19
What changed — A maximum team size was ruled, superseding a proposed figure that had spread through the tree.
Why — We decided a proposal repeated often enough starts to be read as settled, so it had to be either ruled or removed.
What it replaced — A proposed size carried as if it had been ruled.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.4.0 - Modality D20
What changed — Judges came to aggregate by nomination vote rather than by score, and no entry receives a composite figure.
Why — Our position is that adding scores across judges invents a precision none of them expressed.
What it replaced — Aggregation of judges' scores.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.4.0 - Modality D21
What changed — The Challenge Gym was adopted as a practice layer, unscored and with no bearing on eligibility.
Why — We decided practice only stays practice if nothing is riding on it.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.4.0 - Event E7
What changed — A short narrated film became the event’s introduction on the landing page, with captions in each language.
Recorded in —
src/pages/challenge/ — 8ea5c90· Source: this site’s page history · See the page → - Foundation F4
What changed — Our own rehearsal entered the base under a strength of its own — practitioner observation, internal, whose only honest external register is that in rehearsal we observed.
Why — Our position is that a room of educators in one session is field experience rather than a finding, and that merging it into a randomized study would weaken the study.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/50-evidence/evidence-ledger.yaml - Foundation F5
What changed — The guiding position the foundation leans on landed in canon, authored by Carlos Miranda Levy and labelled a design position rather than evidence.
Why — We decided a position the foundation rests on should be citable canon carrying its own honesty label, rather than a claim with nowhere to point.
What it replaced — A claim with no canon to cite.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/50-evidence/evidence-ledger.yaml - Modality D22
What changed — The six rehearsal lessons were ruled, one of them as re-adjudicated, and a process declaration became a gate of its own at every band.
Why — We decided that if using a real thinking process is the point, teams cannot be left to invent one under the clock and never account for it.
What it replaced — The first landing of the fourth rehearsal lesson.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.5.0 - Modality D23
What changed — The modality canon and the event were separated: the canon lives here, the event lives on its own pages.
Why — We decided event facts sitting inside canon make the format look like the property of one organizer, one country and one calendar.
What it replaced — Event facts carried inside canon.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.1.2 - Event E8
What changed — The foundation page received a second correction: an assertion whose citation had been removed on the first pass was found to have survived as a bare statement, and was rewritten rather than merely uncited. The rehearsal kit, the generator and the lessons page were corrected the same day to the rulings that had just landed.
Why — We decided that deleting a citation and keeping the sentence is not a correction but the failure itself, and that verification has to read the sentence rather than count the citations.
What it replaced — A verification that walked citations and reported the page clean.
Recorded in —
src/pages/challenge/foundation/ — 67d65d4 · src/pages/challenge/{demo,generator,lessons}/ — b4d9265· Source: this site’s page history · See the page → - Foundation F6
What changed — Verification moved from walking claim identifiers to sweeping the propositions themselves, in all three languages.
Why — We decided an identifier walk is blind to the failure that actually happened — a claim published with its provenance stripped no longer has an identifier to find.
What it replaced — Verification by identifier walk alone.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/70-derivation/derivation-contract.md - Modality D24
What changed — An adult may now demonstrate by doing inside the Gym, on a decoy, and nothing made there may cross into a submission.
Why — We decided showing is how adults teach a craft, and that the boundary which matters is the artifact rather than the activity.
What it replaced — A blanket bar on demonstration.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.10.0 - Modality D25
What changed — Adult preparation became a verified condition rather than a declared one, and the veto over an under-staffed site sits with the central team.
Why — We decided a site declaring itself ready is the same as no requirement at all, and that the person under local pressure should not be the one who has to say no.
What it replaced — Preparation declared by the site itself.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.11.0 - Modality D26
What changed — Gym practice tasks became decoys as well, and the gate moments are rehearsed rather than only the mechanics.
Why — We decided a practice task close to the real one is a head start, and that the moments teams actually stumble on are the gates.
What it replaced — Practice tasks unconstrained, and gates unrehearsed.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.13.0 - Modality D27
What changed — The central organizing team was named the root of trust for preparation, resolving a circularity in who may prepare whom.
Why — We decided a rule requiring every preparer to have been prepared has no starting point unless someone is named as the first.
What it replaced — A requirement with no starting point.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.13.0 - Modality D28
What changed — The taught set of thinking frameworks was ratified, each carrying its own honesty label and the set closed by an explicit invitation to bring your own.
Why — We decided teaching one framework as the framework is the prescription we had already rejected, while teaching several with the door open is not.
What it replaced — A single featured framework.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.13.0 - Modality D29
What changed — The technique menu was ratified and reaches participantes from the middle band upward, staying adult-facing at the youngest.
Why — We decided a menu handed to young children is noise rather than help, while withholding it from older teams withholds the craft itself.
What it replaced — A menu with no ruling on who receives it.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.13.0 - Modality D30
What changed — Three small points were settled: the preparation cohort's size band, how an area of the short check passes, and how rehearsal coverage is read.
Why — We decided each had already been read two ways by two documents, which is how one figure becomes a different figure downstream.
What it replaced — Two readings of each point.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.14.0 - Modality D31
What changed — The Spanish renderings were ratified as canon and the French set authored.
Why — We decided carrying an English term with a gloss inside a Spanish page is a placeholder, and placeholders ship.
What it replaced — English terms carried with a gloss.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.14.0 - Modality D32
What changed — The educator's own Learning Object was ratified and given a home of its own in canon.
Why — We decided an object of that weight cannot live inside the specification of a derived artifact, where a reader would meet it as guidance.
What it replaced — The object declared inside an artifact specification.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.14.0 - Event E9
What changed — The event record was established in this repository as the single source of edition facts, and the one ruled calendar fact was placed on the event surface in its permitted wording: the first edition is scheduled for November 2026; venues, tiers and locations are being confirmed.
Why — We decided that edition facts sitting inside the methodology canon made the format look like the property of one organizer, one country and one calendar — so they moved here, with their provenance, and the canon carries none.
What it replaced — Edition facts carried inside the methodology canon.
Recorded in —
docs/challenge/event-record.md — established 2026-08-24 (5df6381); §2 Calendar· Source: this site’s event record · See the page → - Modality D33
What changed — The commitment a school makes was sized, and the distinction between a floor and a default was made load-bearing.
Why — We decided a school cannot say yes to an unsized commitment, and that a floor printed as guidance stops being a floor.
What it replaced — An unsized commitment.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.15.0 - Modality D34
What changed — The French name of the Challenge Gym was corrected, and the other flagged rendering confirmed.
Why — We decided the earlier coinage named a building in French, which is the opposite of what the Gym is.
What it replaced — The earlier French coinage.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.14.0 - Modality D35
What changed — Components of the educator's object that no instrument reached were closed by adding instruments, and the preparation hours rose accordingly.
Why — Our position is that the object is not narrowed to fit the instruments; the instruments are built to reach the object, and the cost of that is stated rather than softened.
What it replaced — Components declared and exercised by nothing.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.16.0 - Modality D36
What changed — The per-edition re-confirmation floor rose to carry an observation that had been deferred into that session.
Why — We decided absorbing a new reading without adding time does not make a session denser — something else gets cut, and the likeliest casualty was the part we re-run every edition.
What it replaced — The floor as it was first sized.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.17.0 - Modality D37
What changed — The deferred observation became a named duty of the local lead, with a row of its own in the accountability matrix.
Why — We decided an unassigned observation does not happen, and that without an owner it is not verification at all.
What it replaced — An observation with no owner.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.17.0 - Modality D38
What changed — The canon tree was renamed after the modality rather than after the event, alongside the landing of the modality's own canon document.
Why — We decided a directory named after one event made the format look like that event's property.
What it replaced — A tree named after the event.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.18.0 - Modality D39
What changed — Our own rehearsals stopped being kept inside the building: what we observed may now be published, always inside the very sentence that says we observed it in a rehearsal.
Why — We decided the honest thing was never the silence but the attribution — the hazard was only ever presenting one session of field experience as research, and naming who observed what, in every sentence, removes it.
What it replaced — A rule that barred the content when the hazard was always the framing.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.20.0 - Modality D40
What changed — A consultation now has a record shape of its own — when it happened, who was consulted by role, what we asked, what we heard in the observed register, and what was ruled, built or declined because of it.
Why — We decided that leaving the category undefined meant the first consultation would be recorded under whichever label the person writing it happened to choose that day.
What it replaced — No structure at all, and a page that already had to accommodate one.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.20.0 - Modality D41
What changed — The position that Smoother never meant removing effort was reviewed, confirmed as written, and cleared to appear in public, always carried as the design position it is.
Why — We decided the methodology is about removing meaningless effort rather than effort itself, and that the effort worth keeping — call it friction — is what makes a cognitive experience meaningful.
What it replaced — A position held inside the building while its wording awaited review.
Recorded in —
ssot/desafios/00-meta/rulings.md· landed in SSoT0.20.0 - Event E10
What changed — This page was created, and the lessons page was replaced: each of the rehearsal’s six lessons now carries the disposition it received, and every observation carries, inside its own sentence, that it was observed in a rehearsal.
Why — We decided that a page showing what we noticed but not what we did about it tells a reader we noticed something and leaves them to assume the rest.
What it replaced — A lessons page of findings without dispositions.
Recorded in —
src/pages/challenge/evolution/ · src/pages/challenge/lessons/ — this change· Source: this site’s page history · See the page →
What is not settled
Open questions remain registered, and nothing on this page should be read as the modality being finished. We do not publish a count of what is open or a date by which it closes: a count goes stale, and a date we have not decided would be an invention.
Where the rules actually live
The modality canon is the canon document in the methodology repository; anything about a particular edition belongs to that edition’s own pages. The links in the timeline are the substance of this page.
The canon document is protocol/smoother-desafios.md in the Smoother methodology repository, which is not public today. Each entry therefore names its record as provenance — the ruling identifier and the file it lives in — without a hyperlink, rather than pointing at a destination that would not open. If the canon gains a public home, the entries will point at it.
Event entries link to the pages of this site that they describe.
How this page is maintained
It is generated from the change record itself, so an entry cannot be quietly edited into saying something the ruling does not, and a new ruling reaches this page by regeneration rather than by someone remembering. The foundation and modality strands come from the methodology’s own registers; the event strand comes from the event’s record.
Foundation and modality strands generated from the Challenges canon at version 0.20.0.