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Terms of Service & End User Licence Agreement

Last updated: 5 October 2026

These terms apply when you create an account on, or otherwise use, Particle Playground. By creating an account or using the service you agree to them. Please read them alongside our Privacy Notice, which explains how we handle personal data.

1. Who we are and how to contact us

The service is provided under the trading name Particle Playground. For anything relating to these terms, your account, or your data, contact us at support@particle-playground.com. We aim to reply within 5 working days.

2. Who may use the service

  • Minimum age: you must be 13 or over to hold an account. If you are under 13 you may not register, and we ask schools not to create accounts for pupils under 13.
  • Teacher and staff accounts: teacher features are enabled only after we have verified that the account belongs to a member of school staff.
  • Guest use: you may try the service without an account. Guest activity stays on the device you are using and is not saved to any account.

3. Licence to use the service

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable and revocable licence to access and use Particle Playground for learning and teaching. The service is currently provided free of charge. It is for educational, non-commercial use only.

4. Intellectual property

All software, source code, design, interactive mechanics, curriculum visualisations, artwork and question content remain our exclusive intellectual property (or that of our licensors). You may not:

  • copy, modify, reverse-engineer, decompile or extract source code from the platform;
  • resell, sublicense, republish or commercially exploit any part of the service or its content;
  • scrape or use automated means to extract questions, graphics or other assets.

Use by a school, college or trust grants that organisation a licence to use the tool. It does not transfer any ownership, copyright or other interest in the software, brand or content.

5. Acceptable use

  • Keep your sign-in details to yourself; do not share or sell account access.
  • Do not attempt to access another user's account, class or results, or to obtain teacher or administrator privileges you have not been granted.
  • Do not upload or submit unlawful, abusive or offensive content, including through the AI Lab Assistant or issue reports.
  • Do not interfere with the service, probe its security, or place unreasonable automated load on it.

6. Classes, teachers and what they can see

Joining a class using a class code links your account to that class. From then on, the teachers and co-teachers of that class can see your progress, question and exam results, activity summaries and printable progress reports. Teachers can also move pupils between their classes or remove pupils from a class. If you do not want a teacher to see your work, do not join their class.

7. The AI assistants

The pupil AI Lab Assistant

  • The AI Lab Assistant is a teaching aid. Its explanations are generated automatically and may be incomplete or wrong. Always check important points with your teacher or the specification.
  • It must not be treated as a source of marks, grades or official examination guidance.
  • It only discusses the physics question you are working on. It has no access to accounts, marks, class lists or progress records, including your own.
  • What you type is sent to a third-party AI provider so a reply can be generated. Do not type personal information — names, contact details, or anything about yourself or others — into the assistant.
  • Fair-use limits apply (currently a daily message cap) so the assistant stays available to everyone.
  • The assistant is for physics revision only. It is not a private chat, counselling or crisis service. Messages are automatically screened for signs that someone may be at risk of harm. If a concern is detected, the assistant will point you to a trusted adult and free support (Childline 0800 1111, or text SHOUT to 85258; call 999 in an emergency), and the message may be reviewed by our team and — where your school has registered a safeguarding contact with us — sent automatically to your school's Designated Safeguarding Lead so they can help. If you are worried about something, please talk to a teacher or another adult you trust.

The Teacher AI Assistant

  • Verified teacher accounts can ask the Teacher AI Assistant about the progress and common misconceptions of a class they teach. Its answers are automatically generated summaries of question data and are there to support, not replace, professional teacher judgement.
  • A teacher can only ask about classes they own or co-teach. This is checked on our servers for every request, and requests for any other class are refused.
  • Pupil names, email addresses and account identifiers are removed on our servers and replaced with neutral labels before anything is sent to the AI provider. Real names are shown again only in the teacher's own browser.
  • Nothing sent to the AI provider — pupil messages, teacher queries, question attempts or learning records — is used to train, retrain or fine-tune any AI model.
  • Fair-use limits also apply to teacher accounts, and usage is logged for audit and safeguarding purposes.

8. No guarantee of results

Our questions and mock papers are matched to the AQA GCSE Physics specification to the best of our ability, but we are independent and are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or approved by AQA or any other awarding body. We do not guarantee any particular grade or examination outcome, and content may occasionally contain errors — please report anything that looks wrong.

9. Availability and changes to the service

Because the service is provided free of charge, we do not promise any level of uptime. We may add, change, suspend or withdraw features, content or the whole service at any time. We will give reasonable notice of significant changes where we can.

10. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, attempts unauthorised extraction of our content, or misuses the service. You can stop using the service and request deletion of your account at any time — see the Privacy Notice.

11. Our liability

We provide the service with reasonable care and skill. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for loss of progress or data, examination results, loss of profit or opportunity, or any indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of the service. Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law, and nothing affects the statutory rights of consumers.

12. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the service develops. The date at the top always shows the current version, and material changes are recorded on our System Status & Trust page. If a change is significant we will ask you to confirm your agreement the next time you sign in.

13. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction, save that consumers may bring proceedings in their country of residence where the law requires it.

14. Privacy

How we collect and use personal data, including pupil data, is set out in our Privacy Notice.