Folks, exciting news: you’ve given over ONE MILLION ANSWERS on Teacher Tapp. ??

Given we only launched in September, and relied solely on word-of-mouth and social media sharing, it’s amazing that we now have 2,500 daily users. We can’t wait to start sharing the bigger insights we are working on. (Even bigger and better than the ones we’ve been sharing in these weekly blogs so far).

But first, a word on the ‘UPDATE GREMLINS’ …

Last week we updated Teacher Tapp in ways you can see ? (for example, you can now answer more questions).

But we also in ways you cannot see ?. (That’s a ghost emoji, in case you’re wondering).

In future we want to target questions at users. For example, we want to ask science teachers about science technicians, and primary teachers about reading interventions, and PE teachers about their use of trampolines.

To do this we had to change the way our app and databases are constructed. Doing that is a bigger job than most updates, but now that it’s done we shouldn’t have to change again for ages.

As we’ve crossed over there have been a couple of glitches. Not least because you all love answering the extra questions so much you nearly broke our servers! But that’s now sorted. And we definitely want you to keep answering.

However, until everyone has updated the system is going to be a bit bonkers because we are running two versions of the data and that causes hiccups.

So 713 of you need to get a wriggle on and UPDATE if you haven’t already. (Want to know how to do that, read this)

If you can already see the ‘more questions’ button, you are fine. But from from Thursday we will be changing all the questions and tips on the OLD app version. People who haven’t updated will not see any new tips, or any sensible questions, until they upgrade. In doing so this will speed along the process of closing off the old app, and mean the experience for everyone gets more fabulous from here on in.

The extra question BUG

For those upgraded you will now see the ‘MORE QUESTIONS’ option and you can catch up on questions you missed.

Some early starters of this option had a few problems. Sorry, in particular, for the fact it kept asking your age! Although this response did make us giggle…

It kept asking me my age…..I got younger each time 😉

— Miss (@missdcox) April 6, 2018

We’ve mostly fixed this now, although you may see a ‘no results’ page when you get to the end of answering all the questions.

Geography teacher Mark Enser has suggested we replace that page with a massive picture of Nick Gibb as some sort of end-of-computer-game boss. Thoughts? Hmm. Maybe we should ask it as a question….

What does this mean for weekly results?

Because of all the interruptions, the data for this week is patchy. We could create graphs, and pretend everything is okay, but that wouldn’t be fair. So we are going to do a full report next week.

Until then, what you might want to know are that:

You’ve now given a million answers
About a third of you regularly read the tips blogs – this means authors get around 800 eyes on their webpage, out of the blue. We like when this randomly delights them.
Our retention rate is around 50% – 60%. That is, of everyone who has ever signed up to the app, around that many stay on board. Over 60% of people who signed up in our very first week are still answering. We’re pondering whether you should get special badges for length of service – like blood donations. What do you reckon?
A LOT of you log-in at 3.30pm. This is exacerbated in the holidays, and hence slowed the servers this week. But even outside of those times, a lot of you are fast on your fingers! It means we’ve had to up our server capacity sharply, but it should now hold – hurray!

Going forwards we need you to keep sharing ideas and issues with us…

We are enormously grateful to the people who contacted us this week over log-in issues, glitchy tip links, bizarre repeating questions, and so on.

The Teacher Tapp team is tiny and so far has been done largely around other full-time jobs, so we need eyes and ears on the problems. Send us an email, or tweet us if you see anything.