Tactile History

Touch history. Then talk to it.

Watch a real lesson unfold: a student circles the Louisiana Purchase on a live map, and Tactile History builds the lesson — grounded in the actual 1803 treaty, Jefferson’s letters, and period cartography from the world’s public archives.

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T Tactile History Period: Early 19th century (1800–1830) SELECTED REGION Louisiana Territory (1803) ~828,000 sq mi • Mississippi R. → Rocky Mtns Generate lesson

Above: a student traces the Louisiana Territory on the classroom panel — ~828,000 sq mi, Mississippi River to the Rockies.

STEP 2  •  THE LESSON

A lesson built from the actual documents

In seconds, a Claude vision model returns a lesson keyed to the drawn region and the selected time period: $15 million paid on April 30, 1803, ~4¢ per acre, roughly doubling the United States overnight.

Every claim is anchored to sources the student can open with one tap.

← The Louisiana Purchase, 1803 Save lesson Generate quiz → FACTS AT A GLANCE Signed: April 30, 1803, Paris Price: $15,000,000 (~4¢/acre) Area: ~828,000 sq mi (2.14M km²) Effect: doubled U.S. territory Later became: 15 states in whole or part The Louisiana Purchase, 1803 Generated lesson • 4 min read • Grade 8–10 • Early 19th century In April 1803, envoys Robert R. Livingston and James Monroe signed a treaty in Paris that transferred roughly 828,000 square miles of North America from Napoleonic France to the United States for $15 million — about four cents per acre. Overnight, the young republic doubled in size. Why Jefferson bought it President Thomas Jefferson had sent Monroe to Paris hoping to buy only the port of New Orleans — Mississippi River access was vital to American farmers. Napoleon, needing cash for war with Britain, offered the entire territory instead. What came next A year later, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out from St. Louis to map it. SOURCES National Archives Library of Congress David Rumsey Monticello
Quiz screen showing question three of five about the Louisiana Purchase price of $15 million with instant explanation.

STEP 3  •  THE CHECK

Five-question quiz, one tap away

Turn any lesson into a five-question multiple choice quiz. Students tap to answer. The panel shows the right answer and a plain-language explanation grounded in the lesson text.

Great for exit tickets, warm-ups, or whole-class review.

STEP 4  •  THE ARCHIVE

From summary to the real thing

Behind every lesson: a searchable archive drawer that surfaces Delisle’s 1718 Carte de la Louisiane, the original 1803 Treaty of Cession from the National Archives, Lewis & Clark’s 1814 expedition map, and Jefferson’s own letters.

Full pinch-zoom, no login, no leaving the app.

Archive browser results for Louisiana Purchase 1803 showing Delisle 1718 map, Nicolas de Fer, the 1803 treaty from National Archives, Lewis and Clark map, Jefferson letter, and Barbe-Marbois portrait.

Physical zoom

Students pinch, pan, and circle any region on a live map or curated historical basemap with a finger.

Vision-grounded lessons

A multimodal Claude model sees the same map the class sees and writes a lesson for that exact place and period.

Selectable periods

Pre-1500, Age of Exploration, Early 19th c., Civil War era — every lesson stays inside the window you pick.

Built-in review

Generate multiple-choice questions from any lesson with one tap. Instant feedback, no answer key required.

Real archives

Browse Library of Congress, David Rumsey, Europeana, Internet Archive, Wikimedia, NARA, and DPLA from inside a lesson.

Built for classrooms

Device-bound licenses, no student PII collected, admin dashboard for districts.

In the room with students

A wall-mounted Android panel becomes the lesson surface. Students circle the region they want to discuss; the app reads the touch path, snapshots the map, and asks a vision-language model for a grounded lesson keyed to your time period.

No keyboards, no student accounts, no PII collected. Each panel runs one license — and, as in the photo, we blur student faces by default in any marketing material.

A student at an interactive classroom panel, face blurred for privacy

Photo: Als33120, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ready to bring history to life?

No credit card to start. License binds to one classroom panel.

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