One catalog, five classrooms
Canoa // edu is not a set of worksheets about coins. It is a spiral: the same objects carry a student from expanding an abbreviation in year one to writing a program that queries 128862 coin types in year four. Every track below draws on the same catalog — 128862 published types, 39642 of them illustrated with museum photographs, 540692 individual specimens, and 2644 mints with coordinates.
The progression
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Stage 1 — Read a coin
Decode the text on an object: abbreviations, titles, dates.
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Stage 2 — Read a society
Use the object as historical evidence and as an image.
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Stage 3 — Read the data
Move from one coin to thousands: statistics and patterns.
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Stage 4 — Build the tool
Write the program that asks the next research question.
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Stage 5 — Publish
A student project that stands up to a scholar reading it.
Stage 5 (publishing student research) is a goal we are building towards with pilot schools, not a shipped feature — we would rather say so than list it as available.
The tracks
Stage 1 · Grades 9–12
AP Latin & Latin III–IV
Read the shortest authentic Latin texts that survive
Coin legends are real Latin, written for a mass audience, in a fixed and highly abbreviated register. Students expand the abbreviations, translate the titulature, and explain what the emperor claimed about himself in the space of twenty letters.
6 assignments · 3–4 weeks, or one per unit
Stage 2 · Grades 7–12
World History & AP World
DBQ practice with objects instead of paragraphs
A coin is a state-issued document that circulated in millions of copies. Students treat it as a document-based-question source: who issued it, to whom, with what claim, and how do we know when. No prior Latin or Greek is required.
4 assignments · fits one imperial or Hellenistic unit
Stage 2 · Grades 9–12
Classical Civilization & Art History
Iconography, portraiture, and the visual language of power
Coins are the only mass medium of the ancient world in which a portrait can be dated to the year. Students track how a ruler's image changes across a reign and compare the same deity or personification across mints and centuries.
4 assignments · pairs with a sculpture or architecture unit
Stage 3 · Grades 9–12 · math, statistics, and data-literacy electives
Data & Patterns: Hoard and Metrology Analysis
Statistics and graphing on a real archaeological dataset
Weights, diameters, and hoard contents are numbers with archaeological meaning. Students compute means and spreads, plot debasement over time, and reason about sampling bias in a dataset nobody designed for them.
3 assignments · one unit of descriptive statistics
Stage 4 · Grades 11–12 · CS, capstone, independent study · in development
Build Your Research Agent
Computer science capstone on a public scholarly API
CANOA publishes a documented JSON API and machine-readable descriptions for AI agents. Students write a program — or an LLM-driven agent — that asks a real research question and defends its answer against the underlying data. The agent works with the open catalog only; no student data ever touches an AI system.
Project unit · 3–6 weeks
The five task types
| Task type | What the student does | Grading |
|---|---|---|
| Legend decoding | Expands the abbreviations of an authentic legend and translates it. | Automatic, against the transcribed legend |
| Blind attribution | Names authority, mint, denomination and metal from the object alone. | Automatic, field by field |
| Metrology math | Estimates weight and diameter, then compares with recorded specimens. | Automatic, with tolerance |
| Essay | Argues a claim about the coin in a paragraph or a museum label. | Teacher, side by side with the record |
| Curation project | Builds a themed selection of coins and justifies the selection. | Teacher, against your rubric |
Auto-graded types are checked against the catalog record, never against a stored answer key a student could find. See how it works.
Start with one class period
Every track has at least one free lesson plan you can teach without signing anything.