Chalkface Blog

An analysis of the effect of using Yacapaca to teach Physics at a British International School

18/08/2015
This is a guest post from Matt Baker, who teaches Physics at Bangkok Patana School, one of the leading British International Schools in Thailand, and a Yacapaca Pathfinder school. Matt has been using Yacapaca for several years and has it well-embedded into his Physics curriculum (see here for Matt’s iGCSE course). I asked Matt how he knew that Yacapaca was boosting his results. Good scientist that he is, he laid out the data.

At Bangkok Patana School there are 6 classes of students who study IGCSE Physics and they are split into 3 populations – W, X and Y. Each teacher teaches 2 classes from a given population.

Students are sorted into populations based on KS3 attainment so each population should be of approximately equal ability at the start of Y10.

Last year’s results

As you can see:
- W had highest (more…)
Current subscription tiers

02/08/2015

We currently have four levels of subscription:

Free

Up to 250 assigned quiz attempts per month. This is the tier every teacher is automatically assigned when they join Yacapaca. 250 attempts/month is approximately what you need to (more…)
Pathfinder schools

02/08/2015
Are you getting the most out of your Yacapaca subscription? I do my best to highlight good practice in this blog, but there is a limit to what can be done in text, or even video. More powerful by far is to invest a couple of hours in directly observing what other schools are doing with the system. With our new Pathfinder schools, it becomes easy to do just that.

At your regional Pathfinder, you can
- join the school’s own Yacapaca CPD events, usually at no or nominal cost.
- talk one-to-one with a colleague who has (more…)
Finally, we got our patent

15/07/2015

And here it is. Patents are written in a language that is absolutely mind-numbing to the rest of us so I’ll forgive you for not reading it. Basically what it covers is our Thurstone Ranking approach to peer assessment system, which is absolutely unique in the world.

We applied for this patent four years ago so it has been a long slog to get it granted. You can imagine that corks are popping at Yacapaca HQ tonight.
Comparing Yacapaca to SAM Learning and Doddle

05/07/2015

In conversations with teachers, the two sites I hear Yacapaca most frequently compared to are SAM Learning and Boardworks Doddle. The three sites are very different in both function and ethos and most schools probably use at least two out of the three. However, to the extent that a student who is using Yacapaca is not at that moment using either of the others, we can be said to be competitors.

So how do we stack up? In the following chart I have used as far as possible data published by the companies concerned and up to date as of June 2015 (prices to April 2016).

(more…)