As they play and learn with Shoelace, your students are generating a lot of valuable data! This data can empower you to make smart strategic choices, like how to group players together more effectively, which lessons to implement next, and even the ability to personalize the learning content for each student to best meet their abilities.
But, let’s face it, data can also feel really overwhelming!
This is why we’ve been building My Coach, a tool that’s designed to make this data work for you.
What Is My Coach and How Does It Work?
My Coach is like having a personal assistant who is constantly monitoring your players data and working to spot anomalies. When it detects that an intervention is needed, it takes control and immediately assigns the player an intervention assignment tailored to the skill and the player’s skill tier.
For you, everything that My Coach does is visible on your dashboard so you can follow along. On your dashboard you can see which students it has recently flagged, as well as how they have done (or are doing) on their intervention assignments.
Should the player need additional assistance after the intervention, we’ll notify you, so you can follow up with them in person.
On the other hand, players will not know when they have been selected for an intervention, as it uses the same question window and does not impact their regular game play experience. They will continue to answer questions, only this time the questions will be supplied from the intervention assignment. Once the assignment is complete, they will be back to receiving questions from the Learning Engine as normal.
How Is My Coach Different From the Learning Engine?
Both the Learning Engine and My Coach will notice and respond to players’ struggles. The main difference is that the Learning Engine focuses on breadth, while My Coach focuses on depth.
With the Learning Engine, the content delivered to the player will change over time, increasing or decreasing in difficulty as needed. However, as it is focused on breadth, players’ encounter with any specific skill will be intermixed with all other skills the player is currently practicing. The Learning Engine is responsible for the vast majority of content that players will encounter in the game.
My Coach responds to the struggle with an immediate action by interrupting the Learning Engine to deliver targeted practice on the skill. During an intervention students are focused on a single skill as they practice it in isolation. The interventions are short, consisting of around 10 questions at a time. Once the intervention is finished, the Learning Engine will once again regain control of the students’ educational journey.
How Does My Coach Work With Teacher Assigned Assignments?
As always, preference is given to assignments from teachers over other content. Assignments are given to players to be completed with priority given to those due first. If there are no active educator assigned assignments, then interventions get priority (followed by the Placement Test and then the Learning Engine).
Where Can I Find My Coach?
Shoelace users can log in to their dashboard to access My Coach at any time. My Coach offers your players unparalleled responsiveness with automated interventions and access to assignments.
New to Shoelace? Click here to sign up!