Week in Review: Reading Modules, Word Tiles, and Finally Sorting Out the Sound Design

108 commits this week. Less architecture theatre, more teaching texture.

Those weeks are good. They feel close to the actual student experience.

english-exercises.org

The big new piece was the first proper article module: The Offline Club at B2.

I added the article module itself, then immediately spent time making it less annoying:

• hero image
• vocabulary tooltips
• shorter article text
• audit fixes
• better calibrated reading questions

That last part matters a lot. Reading tasks are easy to make fake-hard. Long text, vague options, done. Actual useful difficulty takes more care.

I also built grammar-coloured word tiles for the word-order work. Seeing grammar roles visually is such a simple win. It makes sentence structure feel less abstract and less like a punishment.

Then there was the sound cleanup. I normalised sound volumes across the level test and related flows because some of the effects were, frankly, too pleased with themselves.

Now they’re quieter. More civilised.

Firstly Academy

Firstly had a mixed bag week:

• Production Practice got a clearer action button
• Essay Architect intros were reworked
• a lot of Use of English part 3 data got cleaned up
• paraphrasing progress/auth issues were fixed
• Floating XP animation landed
• Fluency Gym completion tracking got wired up properly

There was also a small but important auth improvement: new students can be auto-assigned to me instead of drifting around in limbo.

Lesson Planning

On the teaching side I added music video gap-fill research and started shaping that into something reusable.

I keep noticing the same pattern: classroom experiments become product features, and product features kick ideas back into lesson design. The loop is getting tighter.

The Real Shift

This week the apps felt more like teaching tools and less like software that happens to contain English.

That’s the direction I want.