For teachers: 7 things to check before paying for abacus class software

For owners of small abacus and mental-arithmetic classes who are comparing tools.

Before you pay for any software for your abacus class, check seven things: it keeps the real abacus, it shows the likely wrong bead move, you can define your own levels, homework comes back marked the same day, parents see only what you choose, it runs on whatever your families already own, and the price still makes sense at 30 students. In our experience the first two are the ones most often missing, and they are the ones that change what you teach.

Why "it tracks progress" is not enough

Every tool says it tracks progress. What a progress chart tells you is that a child scored 70% on Tuesday. It does not tell you what to do in the first ten minutes of the next lesson. For that you need the *type* of mistake: a 5-complement done in the wrong direction, a 10-complement forgotten on the carry, a column shift, an answer read from the wrong rod. Five or six patterns account for most errors in a class. A tool that records the pattern pays for itself in lesson time; a tool that records the score is a gradebook.

The 7 checks

1. Does it keep the real abacus?

Most apps put beads on a screen and have the child tap them. That is a different skill. If your students solve on a physical abacus and you want them to keep doing so, the tool should accept the *answer* only, and the diagnosis should work from the answer, not from what they tapped. Ask: "Can a child use their own abacus and just type the result?"

2. Does it show the likely wrong bead move?

Ask for a screenshot of what the teacher sees after a wrong answer. If it is a red cross and a percentage, keep looking. You want something closer to "moved the 5-bead down instead of up on the tens rod". The best tools reconstruct the likely wrong move from the wrong answer and show it as a picture, so you can show the child too.

3. Can you define your own levels?

Your class has a ladder: your franchise's grades, the Japanese kyu and dan, or your own. If the tool forces its own ladder, every certificate and every parent conversation needs a translation. Look for a level table you can edit, or at least a mapping you can set once.

4. Does homework come back marked the same day?

Paper homework is marked next lesson, a week later, by which time the mistake has been practised seven more times. The tool should mark it the moment it is done and put the mistake type in front of you before the next lesson. Five problems per subject, ten minutes, five days a week is enough; the point is the return, not the volume. (More on this in homework that actually gets done.)

5. What do parents see?

Parents should see that practice happened and roughly how it went. They should not see a ranking of their child against classmates, and they should not be asked to mark anything. Check that you control what the parent view contains.

6. Does it run on what families already own?

A tool that needs a specific tablet is a tool that half your families cannot use. A browser-based tool runs on the phone that is already in the house. Ask whether an app store install is required and whether it works on an old Android phone.

7. What does it cost at your size, in a year?

Per-student pricing looks cheap at 10 students and expensive at 40. Flat pricing is the opposite. Work it out for the class you expect to have in a year, not the one you have today, and check whether the trial needs a credit card.

A quick scorecard

Where Soroban Kingdom sits

Soroban Kingdom was built from the Japanese classroom habit of solving on a real abacus and entering the answer, so it passes checks 1 to 4 and 6 by design: the app works out the most likely wrong bead move from the wrong answer and shows it as a picture (a clue for you and the child, not a record of their hands), homework is auto-marked, and the level table (20th kyu to 10th dan) can be matched to your own curriculum. Whether check 7 works for you depends on your size; the teacher screen can be tried for 14 days without a card. The checklist above is useful whichever tool you end up with.