Most marks aren't lost because a student can't do the work. They're lost in the first ten seconds — before any working is done — because they read the question and reached for the wrong tool.
Try one. It takes eight seconds, and it's from a real Grade 11 course.
FREE FOR 5 DAYS · NO CARD · CANCEL BY CLOSING THE TAB
What's the first move?
Every exam question buries an instruction in ordinary language. Maximum value means find the vertex. Excess means the other one ran out first. A student who doesn't hear those words starts the wrong procedure, executes it perfectly, and gets nothing.
They read an exam-style question and pick what they'd do first. That's all. They can't pattern-match their way through it, because every question in the topic looks the same until you read what it's actually asking for.
The app tracks which topics they keep missing and puts them in front of them more often.
A student can factor a trinomial and still not know what discriminant means. They have memorised the machinery and none of the meaning, and it holds until the question is phrased a way they haven't seen.
The word check finds those gaps — and names the word they're fusing it with.
Most students can't begin an essay because they're choosing ideas, ordering them, finding evidence and composing sentences all at once. That exceeds anyone's working memory. It isn't a discipline problem.
The bench holds each step so their head doesn't have to.
Most study apps show a parent a green streak and a number of minutes. That tells you nothing you can act on. This tells you what's actually going wrong — in the words you'd use to explain it to them.
They started writing after 41 seconds — not long enough to have decided what they think. Their longest stall came at 154 words, which is the end of paragraph two. That's where they ran out of plan. They didn't run out of ideas; they never had one written down.
A tutor explains quadratics again, more slowly. That helps — and it lasts exactly as long as the tutor is in the room. Nothing transfers into the exam hall, because the tutor isn't in it.
Not what they say they don't know — students are famously bad at that. The word check finds the terms they've been quietly guessing at for two years, and names the word they're fusing each one with.
Before each session they predict their score. Then they find out. The gap between those two numbers is the most dangerous thing in a student's head — it's why kids walk into exams relaxed and walk out surprised.
Recall instead of re-reading. Spacing instead of cramming. Planning before writing. These are things they take into the exam room when the app isn't there.
These are findings about teaching methods, from research on thousands of students — not marketing claims. The method is proven. What we're not going to do is put a number on what it does for your child's mark specifically, because that's a different, longer study than this — and a guess dressed up as a stat is worse than no stat at all. What we will have is an understanding of what works for your child. After a few weeks on the trainer, we can see the patterns — which topics trip them up, which mistakes keep repeating — and weight the training to go after those weaknesses specifically.
Each number is an effect size — how much of a difference the approach made, on a scale researchers use across studies. Rough reading: under 0.2 is barely noticeable, around 0.5 is a real but modest gain, 0.8 and up is a large gain, and negative means it made things worse.
Read the last line again. Teaching grammar made writing worse — the effect is negative. It's one of the most-taught things in school and one of the least effective, while teaching a student an explicit method for planning is among the most effective interventions ever measured in writing.
The rest of the app is built the same way. Retrieval practice and spaced repetition are consistently rated the highest-utility study techniques in the research — while re-reading, highlighting and summarising, the three things every student actually does, rate among the lowest. That's why the trainer never shows them an answer to re-read.
They pick their subjects and how many a day. They arrive on their phone. They answer in ten seconds, or they ignore it — and if they ignore it, nothing happens.
Every app in this category runs on shame — the broken streak, the red badge, the disappointed cartoon animal. It works, and it's corrosive.
There is no streak here. A question they skip isn't a failure. It just comes back another day, because that's what spacing is.
Get one wrong and it returns the next day. Get it right and it backs off — three days, a week, a fortnight, then a month.
By the time a question has stopped appearing, they own it. That widening gap is the entire mechanism.
Three questions from the same subject back to back and they settle into that subject's mode, answering the second two on momentum.
Mixing the subjects forces them to work out what kind of question this even is before they can start — which is the whole skill.
Core subjects across all four high-school years — math, English, biology, chemistry and physics — each written against the Alberta programme of studies, not a generic North American syllabus.
Not per subject. A parent shouldn't have to choose which course their kid is allowed to be bad at.
Three options because the research on this is clear — a single price forces an all-or-nothing decision, and most families default to "no." For comparison: a Calgary tutor runs $60–80 an hour. The term price is roughly one visit.
Every subscription business quietly banks the money of people who stopped showing up. We'd rather find out why. If your child hasn't opened it in a week, they hear from us directly — a short, no-guilt check-in, not a nag, asking what got in the way and pulling them back in. If a second week goes by with still nothing, you'll hear from us too, with an honest look at whether it's worth keeping. We'd rather lose the subscription than take money for something nobody's using.
Because it's not really a study-skills trick — it's how good problem-solving works generally. Across fields, the research is consistent: people who correctly size up what a problem is actually asking before they act on it get better outcomes than people who start executing first and correct course as they go. That shows up in surgery, in aviation, in competitive sport, in engineering — not just on a test.
We won't promise you a grade, because too much else carries a mark — the teacher, the day they have, how often they actually use it. What the evidence does support is the mechanism: get the recognition step right, consistently, and the execution that follows it tends to be right more often too. That's the bet this app is built on.
No. It won't write their essay or solve their equations, and it's built so it can't.
The trainer deliberately has no answers in it — they only ever pick what they would do first. The essay bench holds their plan; it doesn't produce prose. If you want something that finishes their assignments, this is the wrong product and there are plenty of others.
Yes, and plenty of it is excellent. If your child will sit down and work through free lessons on their own, use them — we mean that.
Free content teaches you the material. So does a tutor, more slowly and for $70 an hour. We assume they've already been taught the content, and go after the gap between knowing it and recognising when to use it — plus the habits that keep working after we're gone.
Yes — to read their mistakes and work out what the misunderstanding underneath them is, then write new questions that target it specifically. The wrong answer they picked tells you far more than the fact they got it wrong.
What we don't do is claim to detect "how your child learns best". Learning styles — visual learner, auditory learner — don't hold up in the research, and a tool that hands you a confident label built on nothing is worse than one that says it doesn't know.
We collect what you and your child choose to tell us. A first name, a last name (that one's just to confirm a multi-child discount is actually one household, nothing else), and a grade to start — and beyond that, whatever context actually helps us build training around their real life: practice nights, a long commute, a spare block, whether they have a proper desk to work at. That's not us being nosy — a session plan that ignores four evenings a week of volleyball isn't a good plan, it's a guess.
What we don't do is use any of it against them. Nothing is sold, nothing is shared, nothing is public, and none of it ever shows up as a judgment about them — it exists to fit the training to their life, not to profile them. The site is secured accordingly. If you'd rather share less, that's fine — the trainer still works with just a name and a grade.
What we can say about how results get used: they feed the overall statistical analysis — which approaches actually help, on average, across everyone using the trainer — never as an individual result attached to your child's name. Your own family's dashboard is the one place your child's specific results ever show up.
Full detail: Privacy Policy.
Very possibly. That's the honest failure mode of every study tool ever made, and it's why we email you if they stop.
Sessions are short by design — six to twenty questions, sized to how long they say they can actually focus, because a session they finish beats a session they abandon at question eleven.
Alberta, Grades 9 through 12 — the core subjects. Every question is written against the Alberta programme of studies.
Not Ontario, not BC, not Quebec. Their curriculum is genuinely different, and selling you a tool built for someone else's syllabus would be dishonest.
They try it on day one. They use it for five days. You see what changed, and you decide.
Start freeAlberta Grade 11 · Works on any phone · Nothing to install