The student progresses through a course by completing learning tasks. Every task a student successfully completes, whether a lesson, review, mutlistep, or quiz, earns them XP (eXperience Points), but the amount awarded depends on how well they do.
Students have a daily XP goal, with each XP being roughly equivalent to 1-minute of focused effort.
The daily XP goals can be adjusted depending on the student's schedule or needs.
The first thing a student will be tasked with is our adaptive diagnostic assessment, which will take approximately 30 to 45 minutes, but you don’t have to do it all at once. The assessment adjusts as it progresses and will place the student in the exact right place within the course they need to be. No wasting time with material the student already knows and no frustrations with material that is just out of reach. We call this the student’s knowledge frontier.
The student is presented with a set of learning tasks they can choose from, which will range over a variety of topics, task type, and XP in order to give the student agency in their learning process.
Each lesson begins with a tutorial that introduces a new concept along with a method for solving the particular category of problem.
Introductions are followed by concrete examples that focus the student's attention on the essential problem-solving steps.
Next come a series of up to 5 practice problems. If the student gets two practice problems correct in a row, then they move on to the next example, otherwise, they're given additional problems. Every question has an explanation so they are able to learn from both the lessons and the practice problems.
The system continually evaluates the student’s progress, updating the student's knowledge graph upon the completion of each task. Once a task is mastered, and XP is gained, new tasks are unlocked according to a highly sophisticated algorithm that finds the most efficient, impactful and effective path through a course.
As students work through lessons, they are able to go back and reference lessons and examples to help them with the practice problems. In order to accurately assess their mastery of the material, a quiz is made available to students every 150 XP. Quizzes are timed and students may not refer back to examples and lesson material during the quiz. The timing can be adjusted for each student. Any topics missed during the quizzes are then immediately assigned as review topics. After adequate review, the quiz is available for an optional re-take for even more XP.
Students are placed into leagues depending on how quickly they're earning XP, and can be promoted or demoted to higher and lower leagues on a weekly basis. While students never lose their accumulated XP, each week is a fresh start and an opportunity to be promoted to a new league.
The goal is to be as efficient as possible and have fun. We never want to push students too far or burn them out. What we have seen in the performance of hundreds of kids using the system is that they really enjoy gaining points, getting in higher and higher Leagues and racing against each other in the leaderboard. They are excited about the learning process. We encourage you to give this a try but if you find this is not a motivating factor for your student, you can opt out.
