Fluency Booster's Journey to Success

On February 28, 2025, we proudly introduced Fluency Booster, our latest educational tool aimed at empowering teachers and aiding pupils in mastering essential maths fluency. At Sumdog, we recognise the challenges faced by busy teachers who strive to balance a demanding curriculum with personalised pupil support. Fluency Booster is designed to bridge this gap effectively.

What is Fluency Booster?

Fluency Booster is a specialised resource crafted to reinforce children's fundamental maths skills, promoting continuous and meaningful fluency development. It addresses two major challenges faced by teachers:

1. Ensuring adequate consolidation as new classroom teaching continues to move forward.

2. Regularly assigning tasks tailored to individual pupil needs.

With Fluency Booster, teachers can seamlessly navigate these challenges, ensuring a smooth learning journey for every pupil.

The Vision Behind Fluency Booster

The idea for Fluency Booster originated in October 2023 when our Product Manager collaborated with a teacher to begin exploring how we could adapt Sumdog to meet the needs of even more children better and set out to create a tool that truly addresses teachers' needs. Through in-depth discussions with teachers, we identified areas needing extra support. Teachers highlighted that children often struggle with fundamental number skills and that they lack the time to repeatedly cover these concepts. They expressed a desire for children to truly understand the meaning of numbers, beyond just memorising facts, times tables, and number bonds.

So, Fluency Booster was designed to:

• Foster a deep understanding of numbers and their representations.

• Assist pupils in transitioning between various representations and contexts.

• Introduce children to diverse strategies and approaches for tackling complex calculations.

By integrating adaptive learning behaviours, each pupil embarks on a personalised journey, mastering skills at their own pace. Teachers, in turn, gain access to enriched and diverse data to monitor progress and guide learning effectively.

Key Features

• Personalised Learning Journeys: Adaptive features ensure that each child’s unique needs are addressed.

• Enhanced Teacher Dashboard: The new "Fluency" section offers detailed insights into pupils' progress in the fluency curriculum.

• Tailored Reporting: Intervention reports highlight areas of struggle, providing teachers with actionable information.

The Journey to Launch

In October 2024, we established the Fluency Community, inviting teachers to join us in shaping this tool. By January 2025, we reached out to this community to ask for beta testers, where they got to try out Fluency Booster and give us feedback before we released it to all schools. Twenty-six schools from both the United States and the United Kingdom participated in a three-week beta testing phase.

During that time:

• 1 million questions were answered.

• The average accuracy across all questions was 74.6%.

• 150 skills were actively worked on by pupils.

Teachers relied on the Fluency Focus Report to monitor the skills pupils were practising, along with their accuracy.

They also used the Intervention Report to identify skills where children needed additional support. This report was particularly useful for targeting groups of pupils who were struggling with similar skills, enabling more effective and efficient interventions.

Armed with invaluable feedback from our beta testers, we made final adjustments before officially releasing Fluency Booster on 28th February 2025. This entire journey was guided by a shared commitment to improve maths education for both teachers and pupils.

This marks the beginning of a transformative chapter in maths education. Fluency Booster is more than just a tool; it’s a commitment to supporting teachers and pupils in building confident, capable mathematicians. Ready to see Fluency Booster in action? If you already have a Sumdog subscription, it is included. If you do not, request a free trial to start your journey!