If you put a drill inside a course route, a nine year old spends a fortnight on chapter three. The chapter is a drill on adding up to a thousand, and to leave it he has to answer twenty sums in a row without a mistake. He gets seventeen. Then nineteen. Then fifteen. The rest of the route waits.
We designed that trap ourselves, on a whiteboard, because we wanted one tidy structure: a course made of chapters, with drills inside them. This post explains why courses and drills are now separate, and why neither one controls the other.
A course is a route
A course leads from one place to another. It has a start, an order and a finish, and at any moment you can ask where you are and get an answer.
The route changes as you go. When a check confirms a skill, the start moves forward. A topic you already know never appears. A topic you made a mistake on does not disappear after one correct answer. It comes back a few days later, when you have had time to forget some of it.
The important thing about a route is that it ends. A course can be finished. That is the difference between a course and a feed.
A drill is a rhythm
A drill is a portion of examples every day, until you can do the skill without thinking about it. Twenty sums today, twenty tomorrow, with different numbers.
A drill has no "you are here", because there is nowhere to move. Today's portion does not continue yesterday's. It repeats it. Success in a drill does not look like a finish line. It looks like boredom: the hand does the work while the head thinks about something else. That is exactly the aim.
And a drill does not end by itself. Somebody switches it off.
What broke when we combined them
The boy in chapter three shows the first failure. The route stops and waits for the drill to be "completed". But a drill has nothing to complete, so you have to invent a threshold: twenty in a row, three days without mistakes, whatever sounds reasonable in a meeting.
If the threshold is high, the boy is stuck in chapter three for a fortnight and the rest of the course goes unused. If it is low, it proves nothing: the child moves on with a skill that fails at the first word problem. No value of that number is correct. We looked for one.
The other way round breaks differently. Take a course and give it out in daily portions. Now the route suffers. Somebody misses three days, and there are two possible responses, both bad. One is to give them a triple portion, which punishes them for having a life. The other is to quietly shift the calendar. But then a daily portion is just a course at your own pace under another name.
Both failures have one cause. A route answers the question "what comes next". A rhythm answers the question "how much today". These are different questions, and one structure cannot answer both honestly.
How they connect now
The connection works in one direction only. A course can bring in a drill when a step needs practice. For example, division with a remainder has been covered, so a daily drill on division with a remainder appears.
A drill never switches itself on. This may sound like a matter of politeness, but it is more than that. A product that starts a daily obligation by itself becomes, within a week, a product people hide from. We would rather you had to ask.
Nothing goes back in the other direction. A drill does not move the route and does not report to the course. A drill can also run with no course at all. In a classroom that is the usual case: a teacher gives addition up to a thousand to a whole class, and none of the pupils has an EvoluteMe course.
Why a drill gives no marks
Nothing we have tried breaks a rhythm faster than a mark.
As soon as a portion earns a score, the person starts protecting the score instead of training. They pick the easier examples. They skip the day when they feel unsure, and that is the day the practice was for. Training moves away from where it was needed and towards where the score is easier to get.
So in a drill a mistake is something to work with, not an event. The check says which line the mistake is on, and nothing more. The teacher who set the drill gets a summary of that drill: who did the work and whose mistakes keep repeating. There are no marks and no ranking between people, and the summary says nothing about the courses a child takes at home.
You photograph the sheet
The sums can be done on paper, and then the paper is photographed. The check reads the solution line by line instead of grading only the final answer.
We did not do this for convenience. In arithmetic the hand works together with the head, and after a month of tapping options on a screen a child is slower with a pencil. There is also a simpler reason: a final answer does not show where the mistake happened. You can see that the answer is wrong. You cannot see that the carry was lost on line two.
A missed day is not a debt
A drill counts how many days in a row it was practised, and the screen shows that count. Plenty of people enjoy watching it grow, and there is no reason to hide the number from them.
But nothing depends on that count. There is no reward at the end of it, no message when it breaks, and today's portion is the same whatever happened yesterday. Once a number like that becomes a debt, people come back to save the number and not to practise, and the first flu or family trip ends the habit. So a missed day costs nothing here and is never held against anybody. The count just starts again, quietly, like a tally on a kitchen wall.
There is no competition between children either, at school or at home.
The part we have not solved
We still cannot tell you when a skill has become automatic and the drill should be switched off. Right now a parent or a teacher decides, and the product says nothing.
We have no honest signal. Answer speed depends on where the child is sitting and who else is in the room. An easy portion done without mistakes proves nothing. We could invent a number here in an afternoon, but it would lie in the same way a percent of mastery lies.
So the drill keeps giving out its portion until somebody stops it. If you teach and you already know how you make that decision, write to us: this is the piece we are missing.
