Docs & glossary
Plain-language explanations for every concept in YDABlocks — no jargon, no prerequisites.
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Read
Turns words into positions on a map, where things that mean similar things sit close together.
Look Around
Figures out which words relate to which other words, and blends them together based on how strongly they relate.
Think
Takes the blended idea from Look Around and refines it using a fixed rule — the same rule, every time, for every word.
Answer
Lines up every possible answer and gives each one a confidence score. The most confident answer wins — but it's never the only option considered.
What "fine-tuning" means here
Adjusting how much weight Look Around and Think each get in the final blend — without touching Read or Answer at all.
What a "training pair" is
A matched example — an input, and the output you want for it. Training pairs are what Fine-Tuning actually blends against; they're how you teach YDABlocks your specific pattern instead of a generic one.
Why answers have a percentage
The model never "knows" one right answer for certain — it ranks every option by how confident it is, and the top one gets used.
What Blockswork is
Practice built on skills — one narrow thing at a time, like rounding a 3-digit number to the nearest hundred. It teaches before it tests, works out your level from how you answer rather than assuming it from your age, and tells you why an answer was wrong rather than just that it was. Eight subjects are live: maths, English, science, social studies, computer science, financial literacy, the arts and world languages — maths and English much the deepest, and each course naming the strands still being written rather than hiding them. Included with Pro, Family, and every school and district plan.
What a "subject pack" is
A themed bundle of Blockswork content, spanning K-2 through 9-12. There are 26 packs in total — 13 academic (Arts (Music/Visual), Coding/Computer Science, English/Language Arts, Financial Literacy/Economics, Math, Phonics, Phonics — Remedial, Reading Comprehension, SAT/ACT Vocabulary, Science, Social Studies/History, Spelling, Writing) and 13 language — holding 5,100+ practice items between them. Pack sizes differ by what the material is: each language pack is a fixed set of study cards, Reading Comprehension is built from real passages rather than single items, and Phonics — Remedial is a separate pack for older readers building foundational skills in adult-register examples.
How language packs work
Language packs are study cards, not a quiz — nobody can be tested on a word they've never seen, in either direction. Each card shows the foreign word, its English meaning, and an example sentence with the word highlighted, all at once. There are 13 languages: American Sign Language, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese.
Worked solutions
Blockswork's math, science, and financial-literacy problems don't just mark an answer right or wrong — every one reveals a real, step-by-step solution afterward, and any problem built on a named formula shows that formula on its own line on the card.
Reference tools
A multiplication table, a 1-100 number chart, and a periodic table are always available in Blockswork as study aids, independent of whatever question is currently on screen — not drill content, just something to check while you work.
Streaks and badges
Blockswork tracks a daily practice streak — shown right on the page — plus how many you've gotten right in a row this session, and awards badges as you go (first 10 correct, a 7-day streak, a perfect session, and more).
Who Richard is, and where he's useful
A chat companion trained on YDABlocks itself, not a general-purpose chatbot. His job is helping you understand your build and the four blocks — why Red picked what it picked, what Green was weighing, what to try next. Being able to ask him about a school subject is a side effect, not the point.
Richard can get things wrong
Richard can get things wrong. He's an AI, and AIs state wrong answers with the same confidence as right ones — so check anything that matters, especially facts, dates, and numbers. He's here to help you understand your build and the four blocks; he is not a source of truth, and he isn't a substitute for your teacher, your textbook, or an adult you trust. The one place he's deliberately careful is safety: if a conversation turns serious he stops helping with the lesson and responds with support instead.
Skills, levels and mastery
Practice is organised into skills — one narrow thing each, like rounding to the nearest hundred — grouped into strands and addressed by a code such as A.1 or C.7, the same way a teacher assigns work. Each skill sits at a level, and your own level moves as you practise, up when things go well and down when they don't.
Who gets told, and when
If a conversation trips the safety net, everyone who can act is told at once — during term that's every teacher and administrator at the school plus the district's administrators. During the school's long break those inboxes aren't being read, so it goes to the guardians on file instead, with the district's administrators still included. It switches back on its own when term starts; nobody has to remember. Notifications never contain what was said — only that something was flagged and to check in.
Placement is six questions, once
Before anything else, Blockswork asks six questions — three maths, three reading — and that is the whole of it. Not six per subject: six in total, one time, for the account. Maths and reading predict where somebody sits in everything else better than any other pair does, so the remaining subjects inherit that starting level rather than pretending to have been measured. Spreading the same six across all eight subjects was the tempting alternative and it is worse — one question per subject is inside guessing noise, so it would produce eight estimates that all look measured and none of which are.
Where the drills live
Every drill in Blockswork is reached through Practice — study sets, subject packs, language cards, worked problems, all of it. There is one door to them rather than a copy on each screen, because two versions of the same drill are two places for progress to be recorded and one place for it to go missing.
Why your Blockswork looks different to your child's
Learners get a rail down the side — Home, Practice, Blocks Mastery, the Locker, the leaderboard — because somebody working through their own material should see the whole of it at once. Adults get tabs across the top instead, opening on the thing they came for: a household, a classroom, a district. It is one product in two shapes, and nobody chooses which; it follows from the account.
Connect is counted in hours
Time with a real tutor is measured in hours rather than sessions, and what a plan includes is fixed: Pro includes 2 hours, Family includes 4. An account with no entitlement has no hours, never unlimited ones. Cancelling does not spend them — a family that booked and cancelled has taken up nobody's time, and charging them for it would make cancelling the thing they avoid doing, which is worse for the tutor waiting in an empty room. There is no top-up yet: when a household runs out, booking is refused and says how much is left, because selling more hours would mean pricing tutoring first.
What each plan costs
Individual is $3.99 a month or $29.99 a year — the Builder and the pipeline. Pro is $29.99 a month or $299.99 a year, and adds Blockswork plus 2 hours of Blocks Connect. Family is $59.99 a month or $599.99 a year, covers the household rather than one person, and includes 4 hours of Connect. Schools and districts are not on this list because they are priced per contract, not per seat off a page.
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