This morning we completed our first summer update, which brings major app features and new content to Piqosity’s quickly growing platform. 
Gamifying Practice for Students
Adaptive Practice Gamification is the most visible new feature for student users. Many students will find this new style of personalized practice to be more fun and engaging. The primary features are:
- Instant scoring – Each question is scored individually as soon as the student clicks on submit.
- Sounds and badges – A corresponding sound and image appear according to the question’s difficulty level and accuracy
- Leaderboard points – The number of points a student earns from answering questions correctly is highlighted.
Importantly, Piqosity still keeps track of a student’s key performance metrics–including accuracy and timing–during gamified practice. Therefore parents and educators don’t need to be worried about trade-offs between “fun” and “helpful.”
Piqosity’s founder thought that a “grumpy cat” would be the best badge for an incorrect answer but relented when cat-sympathizers in the office protested. In the future we plan to implement a wide range of different badges and sounds. Note that the gamified practice sounds can be disabled in the setup screen.
Importing Students in Bulk for Educators
For tutors and teachers, the ability to Import Multiple Students is the biggest new feature of this update. Instead of adding students individually, educators can now import their entire rosters from a .CSV file or simply copy and paste rows from a spreadsheet.
Individual, self-registering tutors and teachers can also now purchase discounted licenses on behalf of their students. Previously, this feature was limited only to users who were registered as school administrators or tutoring company managers. Click here to learn more about this feature.
Under the Hood App Improvements
Piqosity offers the unique ability to download any practice set as a PDF for printing. Today’s update brings improvements to these PDFs in the form of new cover pages and improved spacing between different sections of each test.
However, the most important part of today’s update is not actually one that users will see immediately. Behind the scenes we have completely revamped our question and lesson WYSIWYG editors to make them significantly more robust and user-friendly. These updates are so important because they lay the groundwork for any qualified tutor or teacher to be able to upload and customize their own learning content. We are on track to enable these third party uploads by the end of summer.
New and Updated Learning Content
We have made significant updates to our ISEE Upper Level course including more than 500 new and updated practice questions based off our most recent analysis of this year’s student score results and previously released official material. We are also in the process of updating our ISEE Lower Level and ISEE Middle Level courses and expect the majority of the updates to be complete by the end of August.
Today’s update also brings new mini diagnostic practice tests for our ACT and SAT courses. Similar to our ISEE mini diagnostic tests, these short practice exams allow students to quickly get an idea of where they stand on these popular college admissions test. Each mini diagnostic is fewer than 30 questions and requires less than 45 minutes to complete. They also highlight the differences between the ACT and the SAT.
But we did not name ourselves Piqosity (pique+curiosity) only to offer standardized test prep courses. Later this summer we remain on track to launch new math and English courses for grades 5, 8, and 11. By the end of the 2021-2022 academic year, we hope to expand to all grades 5 through 11.
We are proud of what we’ve accomplished with today’s update and even more excited about what is yet to come!
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