We’ve been busy completely upgrading the technology that underpins Kwiziq in preparation for some great new features. Most of the benefits unfortunately won’t be visible to our lovely French testers, but we couldn’t release a new version without at least one or two goodies for you to get excited about.
Leaderboards
If you’ve got a competitive streak, then you’ll love our new Top Testers Leaderboard. This is a way for French students of all abilities to have a fun little race that’s good for everyone. We rank you on the number of tests you take in the month – the more tests you take, the better your French gets. It’s that simple!
Here’s the current month’s Leaderboard. If you don’t see your name on the list, get French testing! We don’t show full names to keep things fairly anonymous, but you’ll see enough to know if it’s you. There are some clear outliers in the lead who are going test crazy as they’ve experienced the positive learning benefits. Our top testers for the last few months have all experienced incredible progress in their French skills.
Improvement Timelines from Day 1
Your Dashboard now shows an Improvement Timeline even after your very first level test. The graph was looking a bit empty with just one lonely data point on it, so to make sure you can see your improvement immediately, we’ve added a zero point starting from the day before you joined. Okay, the graph isn’t terribly meaningful initially – at the start, it’s really more about what we’ve measured about your knowledge than how much you’ve improved – but it’s still motivating to see that line go up from day 1. One day one it’ll look something like this:
But if you test regularly using our French tests that adapt to your needs, you’ll soon see yourself zooming up the French learning curve, and before long it will look something like this:
Monthly Summaries
This feature is something you’ll start to see in your inbox. We can now calculate monthly performance measures for you and send out a regular performance summary to keep you motivated and moving forward with your French. You’ll see how many tests you took, what impact that had on the topics you managed to cover and how much you improved. Suggestions welcome if you want to see something specific we don’t cover.
We have some really great features in the pipeline following this, which will get your French learning moving faster than ever! Watch this space.
A+
Gruff
P.S. Bonus points if you know what “A+” stands for in French. As well being a fantastic grade to get in a test, it’s a common way the French end emails… but why?
Author info
[Follow on Twitter: @gruffdavies] Despite the very Welsh name, Gruff is actually half French. Nowadays, he's a tech entrepreneur (and some-time novelist) but he used to be a physicist at Imperial College before getting hooked on inventing things. He has a special interest in language learning, speaks five languages to varying degrees of fluency and he often blogs about language learning, science, and technology. As well as co-founding Kwiziq, he is the author the Amazon best-selling SF thriller, The Looking Glass Club and the inventor of the Exertris gaming exercise-bike and Pidgin, a free online tool that makes drawing flow charts and relationship diagrams as quick and easy as describing them in pidgin English.