Progress track

Turning a lesson into a board game

The oldest trick in a classroom is to put a path on the wall and let the class move along it. What makes it work is not the path, it is that progress is visible: everybody can see how far the group has come and how far is left, which is the thing a list of ticks never manages. A track of twenty spaces covers a lesson, and a question answered is a space moved.

The labelled spaces are where a plain track turns into a game. Write your own list and the board becomes the lesson: a spelling word on every third space, a times table, a line of a poem, a question about the chapter you have just read. Because the lines are yours and there are up to sixty of them, the same board runs a different lesson every week without anything being printed, cut out or laminated.

A first board game for younger players

For a five year old, the whole of a board game is the roll and the move. Ten spaces is enough, the die does the counting, and the piece lands where it lands. There is no reading to do, no scoring to hold in your head, and nothing to knock off the table. It is also a decent way to teach the shape of a turn: you roll, you move, you hand it on, and the screen says whose go it is so nobody has to be the referee.

The two move instructions are carried out for you, and the rest are deliberately not. A screen that quietly swapped two pieces would leave the table arguing about what just happened, so anything beyond a simple step forward or back is printed, read out, and left to the room. A landing never chains into a second space either, which keeps a turn to one move and stops a bad board from sending a piece round in circles.

Where it sits beside the other trackers

This is the one to use when landing somewhere should mean something: the spaces are labelled and the path has an end. For a loop with laps and a running order instead, the race track counts distance rather than position. When what you want is a number rather than a place, the scoreboard is faster to read and easier to correct, and for hit points that go up and down all game the health bars say their band in words.

The names come from the same shared list every tool here with players uses, so a roster typed into one of them is already there in the next. The list stays in this browser: it is never put into a share link, and a link only ever carries how long the track is and which set of labelled spaces it uses.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.track.state, pph.track.labels and pph.track.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.

Player names are kept under pph.players so every tool with players reads the same list. They stay in this browser and never reach a link.