The Adaptive Picker
"Adaptive" is the most abused word in education apps, so here is our version with actual numbers. Nothing on this page is secret sauce. It's a weighted lottery that favours weakness.
The weighted lottery
When a question is needed, every eligible item gets a ticket count, and one is drawn at random:
| Factor | Effect on tickets |
|---|---|
| Never seen | A steady introduction weight, so new material keeps arriving without flooding the session |
| Low box | Up to 5× more tickets for Box 1 than Box 5 |
| Low accuracy | Up to 3.5× multiplier as the miss rate grows |
| Recently wrong | Up to 3.5× multiplier immediately after a miss, decaying with each correct answer |
| Just asked | Zero tickets. The same item never appears twice in a row |
These multiply together, so a low-box, low-accuracy, just-missed fact can be dozens of times more likely to appear than a mastered one, while a mastered fact still shows up occasionally, which is exactly what long-term retention wants.
What each mode draws from
| Mode | Question pool |
|---|---|
| Adventure | Everything unlocked, mixed: times tables stay the backbone at roughly 40%, the other maths skills share the rest, all still weakness-weighted inside each skill |
| Rocket Round | Pure times tables, 25 questions, 6 seconds each. The speed check |
| Boss Battle | Only the current weakest: the 18 lowest-scoring seen facts, a few unseen ones, plus any other skill the engine has seen your child struggle with |
| Beat the Clock | Tables against a single 60-second clock. Fix-it is skipped here so the dash stays a dash |
| Table Focus / Fact Focus | One table, or one tapped fact from the Times Table Map, drilled with a few neighbours interleaved |
| Tricky Rematch | Exactly the items missed in the round you just finished, offered on the results screen, nothing else mixed in |
Why random, not a fixed sequence?
Fixed sequences are predictable, and kids are pattern-hunting machines: they learn the order instead of the content. A weighted lottery keeps every session slightly different while still spending most of its time exactly where the data says it should. It also means two children at the same "level" get different sessions, because their weaknesses are different.
See it in action: Math Quest · Spell Quest