Put it on your device

On an Android phone or tablet

Open this page in Chrome. If the button above is showing, press it. Otherwise open the ⋮ menu and choose Install app or Add to Home screen. An icon appears with your other apps.

On an iPhone or iPad

Open this page in Safari — this does not work in Chrome on an iPhone, because only Safari can add to the home screen. Tap Share (the square with an arrow out of the top), scroll down, and tap Add to Home Screen.

There is no button on an iPhone, and no page can add one. Apple gives web pages no way to start an installation, so the steps above are the whole of it.

On a computer

In Chrome or Edge, press the button above, or use the small screen-with-a-down-arrow icon at the right-hand end of the address bar. It opens in its own window, without the browser around it. In Firefox and Safari on a Mac there is no install; the page works normally, and a bookmark does the same job.

It works with no internet

The first time you open it with a connection, the whole app is stored on the device — every page, every activity, and the curriculum itself. After that it opens and runs with the network off entirely. This is deliberate: the curriculum is written for classrooms where a connection cannot be assumed.

Installing it to the home screen is not what makes it work offline; opening it once does. Installing makes it easier to find, and on an iPhone it also protects what is saved — see below.

What is stored, and where

A little is remembered so a child does not start from nothing each time: the level chosen, which tables were counted in Pattern Painter, which prices Making Change is using, how long answers stay on screen, and the teacher’s week planner. If more than one child uses the device, each of those is kept under the picture that child picked.

All of it stays on the device it was made on. Nothing about a child is sent anywhere, because there is nowhere for it to be sent — the app has no accounts, no server of its own, and no way to transmit anything. There is nothing to consent to and nothing held about anyone.

Two things about that are worth knowing rather than discovering:

• Children are told apart by a picture, never by a name. On a shared classroom tablet each child taps an owl, a fox or a star on the Students page, and their level and stars are kept under it, apart from everybody else’s. The app never asks for a name and stores none — a class list of children’s names is exactly the kind of thing this app is built not to hold. A device used by one child needs no picture at all and works as it always did. The teacher’s week planner belongs to the device and is the same whichever picture is playing.
• It can vanish. A cleared browser, a private window, or a different browser on the same device all start fresh. On an iPhone, Safari clears it after about a week without a visit — adding it to the home screen prevents that, which is the practical reason to do it. Nothing here should be treated as a record; it is a convenience.

If the app has already been installed on this device, the button above does not appear — there is nothing left for it to do.