Anybody searching this has already decided. The useful question is not which app is nicest, it is which of the things that went wrong will go wrong again.
The four to check
| Ask | Why it decides everything |
|---|---|
| Can the total go down? | A score that can be reduced is one a child protects, and the safe way to protect a total is to attempt less. This is the single biggest one |
| Who can see it? | A number other children or other parents can read is a ranking, whatever it is called. A bad day should not be published |
| Is there anything hard on it? | If everything listed is something they already do, trying earns nothing extra and the whole thing is an attendance record |
| Does a bad day pay anything? | The week you most need it to work is the week it produces nothing, unless something on it can be earned after things have gone wrong |
The one worth being strict about
The first. Everything else can be adjusted later; a system built to subtract cannot be talked out of it, because the arithmetic is the design. If a replacement can take points away, you will be having this conversation again in about six weeks.
What changes when you move it home
A school system has to work across thirty children and be legible to a teacher managing all of them at once, which is why it ends up public and comparative. A home system has none of those constraints. It can be private, it can be built around the specific things that are hard for one child, and it can be worth more for the difficult things than the easy ones — none of which is available to a classroom tool, however good it is at the job it was built for.
Climb Rewards is built on those four answers, and any replacement that gets them right will outlast one that does not.