The Examined Classroom is built and maintained by Matthew A. Zinn. This page documents how the site is made, what tools it relies on, and where its visual and audio assets come from. Transparency about AI use is core to the site's purpose — a resource about AI ethics should be honest about its own use of AI.

All original illustrations on this site — across the Thought Experiments cards, hero art, educator resources, and AI-in-Education pages — were created using OpenAI's DALL·E image-generation model. They are used under OpenAI's terms of service, which assign ownership of generated outputs to the creating account.

The visual direction follows the style guide in the site's repository (warm, painterly, symbolic rather than literal; no identifiable faces; muted palette drawn from the site's theme tokens).

Read-aloud audio for K–2 and K–5 thought experiments was generated using ElevenLabs text-to-speech under a paid commercial-use plan. Voices were selected for warmth and clarity at the relevant grade level; classroom scenes use multiple voices to distinguish characters.

No human voice samples were cloned. All audio is synthesized from text scripts written for this site.

The site uses three open-source typefaces, served via Google Fonts:

• Source Serif 4 — Frank Grießhammer (SIL Open Font License)
• DM Sans — Colophon Foundry & Indian Type Foundry (SIL Open Font License)
• JetBrains Mono — JetBrains (SIL Open Font License)

• React and Vite — the SPA framework and build tool.
• react-snap — pre-renders pages to static HTML at build time for SEO and accessibility.
• GitHub Pages — static hosting.

The site uses no analytics services, no advertising networks, no third-party trackers, and no cookies. See the Privacy Policy for details.

The site's code and content scaffolding were authored by Matthew A. Zinn with substantial AI-assisted development from two coding tools: Anthropic's Claude (via Claude Code) and OpenAI's Codex. All architectural decisions, scenarios, prose, pedagogy, and final review are the author's; AI assisted with code generation, refactoring, and iteration.

The same transparency the site asks of educators applies to its own construction: AI was a tool in the workflow, not a substitute for editorial judgment.

The site references academic publications, research articles, policy documents, and journalism throughout. A curated reading list and source bibliography is maintained on the Resources page.

Quoted material from copyrighted works is included for educational commentary under fair use, with attribution to the original author and publication. Embedded videos use YouTube's standard iframe player and remain the property of their respective creators and rights holders.

Unless otherwise noted, the original educational content on this site is offered under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license — share and adapt freely for non-commercial use with attribution. For commercial licensing or other permissions, contact hello@examinedclassroom.com. Full terms are in the Terms of Use.