Feature Friday: Student Store

First off its important for teachers and parents to note that there are never any real in-app purchases for music students. All of the “currency” they use to get more avatars, backgrounds or any custom awards you have setup are earned by practicing. The student app is always completely free of any monetary commerce or ads. 

A couple of Practice Space’s goals is to motivate students to practice more and to help them stay organized. Having a clear sense of exactly what to practice goes such a long way when it is followed day in and day out. When you create a lesson for one of your music students in the practice space app they will see a clear list of what practice tasks they need to complete as well as any detailed notes you gave them in your lesson plan!

Now let’s start with the fun part of this feature! When students check off the items as completed they earn gems for completing them!

Students can have a lot of fun AFTER they practice (the app’s shop is disabled until they complete a session). Here is what the shop looks like:

After they practice and earn some gems they can start customizing! All of the avatars or backgrounds they get are saved to their inventory, so they can change them around anytime!

Let’s go through the options they have.

Avatars  and Backgrounds

When students open the app the home screen has their current avatar character and background. All of the characters give some motivating comments to the students as well as some musical definitions such as info on tempo markings or dynamics. We keep a steady update of avatars into the app to keep things alive and motivating! The avatars and backgrounds also keep with the seasons to make them feel really fun and relevant. Here are some of our favorite ones:

Streak Freezers

One other way students can get gems to purchase items is by completing Practice Streak Challenges. We all know that somedays students have to travel or they get sick: things come up. To stop them from losing their streak students can purchase a streak freezer, so if they miss a day of practice, they won’t lose their streak. We know this can seem like a cheat at first glance, but at the end of the day, this is about motivating and empowering students to work hard. In my private studio, I have seen so many kids get close to the 100-day practice streak and miss a day when I didn’t at first give a pass, I saw the majority of kids get demotivated to an extreme. Of course, some music students got right back on the horse, but many did not. When I started giving a day pass, motivation prevailed all around!

Custom Awards

We made a short video tutorial about this feature to help you set it up. This feature is one of our favorites! You can watch the video here

So many teachers have gotten really creative with this. Basically anything you can give to a student that is in your budget from a time or money point of view is possible. We have teachers giving out custom arrangments of pop songs or holiday tunes, prize basket selections, tote bags, fun bracelets or medals and trophies. The list goes on and one. You set the prize in your admin dashboard and the students will see it in their app!

Here is an example of how it looks like to the students:

Here are some cool prizes a teacher set up in her studio:

We love seeing so many students having fun with this project. Do your students want to join them?

You can try it for free today!