Over the autumn term we sat in on, or interviewed teachers from, fifty classrooms across primary, secondary and SEN-specialist settings. Some patterns surprised us. Some confirmed what we suspected. A few ideas got quietly killed.
what got used every day
- Finger-scroll reading on a real book. Teachers loved that pupils kept their eyes on the printed page rather than a tablet. "It looks like reading, because it is," one Year 3 teacher put it.
- Character voices on guided-reading books. Twenty-minute group sessions held attention end-to-end where the same book read in a single voice would lose half the group at the ten-minute mark.
- The big-text mode for children with low vision (a use case we hadn't designed for, they found it anyway).
what got abandoned
- The reading-streak feature. Children gamed it; teachers found it distracting; one parent reported it triggered anxiety on a sick day. Gone.
- Voice cloning of a parent reading. Lovely demo, ethically queasy in practice. Not coming back.
- Auto-quizzes after each page. Teachers said it broke flow and felt like surveillance. We replaced it with optional, end-of-chapter "talk-about-it" prompts.
the one thing every senco asked for
Without exception, every SENCO we spoke to asked for the same thing: a way to start a session in under ten seconds, with no login, no class code, no setup. "I have eight minutes with this child. I don't have eight minutes and a password."
That feedback shaped the whole product. Wobble has no accounts, no sign-up and no class codes. You open the app, point the camera, and you're reading. Settings live on the device. If you want to share a tint preset, you share a link.
what we're working on next
- A printable "first ten minutes" card for teachers new to assistive reading tech.
- Better handling of poetry, plays and graphic novels, text where layout is part of the meaning.
- Offline mode for schools with patchy wifi (the request that keeps coming up second).