Why choose Animal Bonds?

Most educational games rank pupils on experience points, daily streaks, or accumulated coins. These are engagement metrics. They tell you a child has been logging in. They do not tell you whether that child can recall a number fact in under two seconds.

Animal Bonds uses Average Response Time (ART) as the sole determinant of rank. Every pupil's rank, from Snail at entry level all the way up to Peregrine Falcon at the top, is calculated from the rolling average of their last five correct answers. A Peregrine Falcon rank means a child is recalling number facts in under 1,500 milliseconds, consistently. It is an honest, scientifically meaningful measure of fluency.

A single wrong answer does not undo hours of progress. There is no cliff that resets a pupil's mastery score after one mistake. Rank tracks current recall speed, and it updates question by question.

Many tools will tell you that a pupil scored 80% on subtraction. The other 20% is left to the teacher to investigate.

Animal Bonds runs an automatic pattern analysis engine on every session, detecting a range of error patterns across subtraction, addition, and response speed. For example, it can flag a borrowing error (where a child is consistently 10 out on crossing-ten subtraction) or identify a near-miss pattern suggesting the child is counting rather than recalling. There are many patterns detected, and we are building more all the time.

This is the diagnostic step most platforms leave to teachers to do manually. Animal Bonds does it automatically, with no teacher configuration, and surfaces results on the dashboard within seconds of a session ending. Teachers move straight from "what" to "why" to "how do I intervene".

The dashboard also offers a per-pupil, per-bond Brainbow for every biome, a colour map running from red through to green, so you can see at a glance which specific bonds each child has yet to master.

Maths anxiety is a well-documented barrier to fluency, and countdown timers (the default mechanism in many popular fluency tools) can make it worse. Most platforms respond by offering difficulty levels that simplify the maths or add a few extra seconds. The pressure remains.

Animal Bonds includes Relaxed Mode, a teacher-toggled accessibility setting designed with SENCOs and primary practitioners. When Relaxed Mode is on for a pupil:

• Time pressure is removed entirely from all game modes

• The time-pressured Quick Strike mode and the Multiplayer tab are hidden from that pupil

• The Apex Trial switches from speed-based ranking to Correct Step Count. Each correct answer adds 1; wrong answers give no score. Progress is only ever forward.

• Biome unlocks at animal-specific Correct Step Count thresholds, so progression is still earned but the pathway is achievable

• A ghost on the race track shows the pupil their own personal best. The race is between them and themselves.

Pupils in Relaxed Mode access the same biomes, the same bonds, and the same content as their classmates. That is what genuine inclusion looks like: not a separate, simpler product for SEND pupils, but the same product with the pressure dialled down where it needs to be.

The dominant pricing models in primary EdTech are per-pupil and per-class. Each new admission means another licence. Each leaver means an administrative adjustment. Each premium tier means another negotiation with the budget holder.

Animal Bonds is a whole-school flat rate. One price, every pupil, every teacher, every feature, all year. Adding a new pupil mid-year does not change the price. Removing a leaver does not require a refund process. There are no per-pupil fees, no per-class tiers, no feature unlock tiers, no in-app purchases, and no advertising.

The cost is predictable from the start of the budget cycle to the end. Animal Bonds is currently in a free pilot phase. Schools pay nothing while we work with our pilot partners to refine the product.

Some popular tools are free for schools but monetise through parent memberships. This creates a visible attainment gap inside the same classroom, where pupils with premium memberships get access to content, pets, or speed boosts that their classmates do not. The "free" tool turns out to be a marketing channel into the homes of children, with a two-tier experience baked in.

Animal Bonds has no advertising of any kind. No in-app purchases. No parent membership tier. No premium pets. Every pupil has identical access to every feature. The cosmetics in the store are all earned with coins collected through play, and nothing is for sale.

Under UK GDPR and the ICO's Age Appropriate Design Code, schools must minimise the personal data collected on children. Some platforms still require pupil email addresses or rely on social sign-in. Others collect parent emails to drive weekly engagement campaigns.

Animal Bonds collects no pupil email addresses at any level. School administrators create accounts by bulk CSV import or individually, and every pupil receives an auto-generated username and password. Teachers view data only. They do not manage accounts. Parents access a separate read-only dashboard. No parent email addresses are collected. There are no weekly parent emails to opt out of, because there are none.

A Data Processing Agreement is provided to schools as standard. A Data Protection Impact Assessment is available on request.

Many fluency tools are native apps. That means app store accounts, version update cycles, IT helpdesk tickets to install on every iPad, and platform-specific bugs. When the school upgrades its devices, the install process starts again.

Animal Bonds is a Progressive Web App. It runs in any modern browser (Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox) on any device the school already owns. There is no app store install. There is no version to push. It works on a five-year-old school iPad as well as it does on a brand-new desktop, and it works offline through a service worker once it has been opened.

You can try the full demo right now without creating an account or providing an email address.

A common criticism of game-based learning is the minutes-of-play to minutes-of-maths ratio. A pupil can spend ten minutes navigating a map, choosing a pet, or watching a cut-scene for every one minute of actual arithmetic practice.

Animal Bonds is the opposite. There is no map to wander. There are no narrative cut-scenes between questions. There are no characters to feed. Every second of session time is fluency practice: racing animals, beating personal bests, climbing through ranks, duelling classmates, and chasing perfect Apex Trials.

The racing mechanic is the engagement. The number bond is the gameplay. There is no gap between them.