A progress tracker that flags the slips
A private app I built for my child's Year 2 learning. It pairs a diary of their schoolwork with the national curriculum objectives, and generates practice papers that flag any skill they've started to slip on.
- Result
- In use at home
- Role
- Product owner and builder (personal project)
- When
- Sep 2026–present
The problem
My child’s schoolwork, activities and milestones were scattered across photos, notebooks and memory. I wanted one place that shows what they’ve done, what’s secure and what comes next, measured against the UK Year 2 (KS1) national curriculum.
The call
Curriculum progress only moves forward: a skill goes from Not started to Introduced, Developing and then Secure. That’s right for the record, but it means a skill they keep getting wrong can sit at “Developing” forever without anyone noticing.
So I kept the status and added a separate Needs review flag beside it. It’s raised when they miss a skill on at least 2 of the last 3 marked practice papers that tested it. It’s calculated fresh each time, never stored, and clears itself once later papers go their way.
What it does
- A timeline diary. Entries with photos, tagged against curriculum objectives. Tagging an objective automatically marks it as Introduced.
- Curriculum tracking. Every Year 2 objective with its status and assessment grade (Working Towards, Expected or Greater Depth), using the official terms unchanged.
- Practice papers. Generated from a question bank that includes past official KS1 SATs questions (2016–2026). I mark them by hand, sign them off, and can reopen one to fix a marking mistake.
- A second curriculum for comparison. The CBSE (India) Class 2 syllabus, linked to the matching UK objectives.
- Activities and clubs. Schedules, activity-specific skills and certifications, kept separate from the curriculum.
- Print-ready reports and certificates. Designed for A4, because the printed copy is what gets filed and handed over.
How I built it
I wrote a short product brief first: one parent, one child, local only, a keepsake first and a tracker second. Then I built it in phases: data model and curriculum seed, core pages, the marking workflow, then backup and reports. Practice papers, the CBSE comparison and the review flag came in later rounds as I used it.
I built it with AI coding tools (Claude Code). Stack: Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, and Prisma with a local SQLite database.
Honest limits
- It has one user (me) and runs only on my own machine. It isn’t deployed, and it isn’t meant for anyone else.
- The code is in a private repository, and there are no screenshots here because it holds my child’s real data.
A record that only moves forward can’t show you a slip. So the slip gets its own flag.