<h1>DFM - 2022 Plans and Overview of 2021</h1> <p>I hope you all had a restful Christmas. As you may be aware, 'Dr Frost Learning' became a charity a few months ago. Thanks to a very kind donation, we're in the process of recruiting our first full-time member of staff and a number of contracted roles. Thank you to all that expressed interest in these, and we have already recruited 4 'Heads of Questions' who will be initially adding questions to our engine from OCR, AQA, SQA (Scotland), Eduqas (Wales) and CCEA (Northern Ireland).</p> <img src='https://www.drfrostmaths.com/images/StudentPicOutline.png' style='max-width:95%;margin-top:50px;margin-bottom:30px'> <p><strong>But as part of our mission to bring free education to everyone, we need additional funding to help our expansion overseas and to other subjects</strong>. We are hoping to recruit Heads of Physics, Biology, Chemistry and Computer Science in Easter for September, but this is purely dependent on how much money we can raise. The site is virtually ad free and to avoid any compulsory subscriptions, we are entirely reliant on donations.</p> <p>You can find out about our work and donate here. <a href='https://www.drfrostmaths.com/donate'>drfrostmaths.com/donate</a>. If a parent, school or other individual nominates a school in their donation, <strong>it earns a school credits</strong> (with more credits if you school has a high FSM percentage and/or a higher <a href='https://www.drfrostmaths.com/schoolsanalysis-map.php'>DFM engagement score</a>). We are currently investigating physical items, e.g. signed padded DFM notebooks, and trophies, that schools will be able to exchange these credits for.</p> <h2>Our plans for 2022</h2> <ol> <li>Building up our staff to enable us to expand more rapidly. Engaging more with schools and Multi-Academy Trusts via for example our 'DFM Evangelists' to deliver more training. <li>Starting the groundwork on other subjects, initially Physics, Biology, Chemistry and Computer Science. <li>Working with more exam boards overseas (and we hope, the International Baccalaureate) to support students in more countries. <li>Improving our primary level/KS2 offering (with potential staff appointments), and look into interactive features to replace our timestables game. <li>Replace the DFM Live! game with a more polished offering, and revising some of the mechanics of how the game works. <li>Continued development of Key Skills (which Gaetan will head, and relinquish his other roles at DFM) </ol> <h2>New features/updates since November</h2> <ul> <li>Replaced the registration system with a cleaner interface that resolves a number of prior issues. <li>Tidied up the home dashboard for students and teachers. <li>Updated the 'points' system so that students have to vary their practice in order to continue earning 'practice points'. Students also get bonus points for completing new Topic Tests or reaching Master Level in new Key Skills. <li>The '<a href='https://www.drfrostmaths.com/schoolsanalysis-map.php'>DFM engagement score</a>' now fairly takes into account the smaller size of some schools. <li>When students get a question right, we've replaced the (somewhat irritating) popup dialog with information, and a confetti explosion, at the top of the page. <img src='https://www.drfrostmaths.com/uploads/users/1/images/img-1-1640942975-994.png' style='max-width:95%;margin-top:50px;margin-bottom:50px'> <li>A slight reorganisation of the top menu, with some of the items in [your name] moved to a new 'Work' menu. <li>For question writers, we now allow more verbose pattern matching for textual input questions. <li>Improvements to the worksheets interface. We no longer distinguish between 'View Mode' and 'Manage Mode'. You can still select worksheets/directories (instead of opening) by hovering your mouse over and using the checkbox that appears. <li>Launched our new donations and 'credits' system. <li>As always, a number of new <a href='https://www.drfrostmaths.com/keyskills.php'>Key Skills</a>, particularly this month for Further Maths A Level. </ul> <h2>Tip for 2022</h2> <p>If you haven't already, consider <strong>setting up a course for your school</strong>. This enables students to sequentially work through questions, videos and other resources on our site, as per your own school's scheme of work. It's super simple to construct and will make immeasurable difference to your students' learning. <a href='https://www.drfrostmaths.com/course.php?sid=2596'>Click here for an example school course.</a></p> <img src='https://www.drfrostmaths.com/uploads/users/1/images/img-1-1640942765-842.png' style='max-width:95%;margin-top:50px'> <p>I wish you all a Happy New Year! Thanks to all those that have supported DrFrostMaths this year or volunteered their time. Special thanks goes to Ben for his £250,000 donation, to my amazing charity trustees Alastair, Archana, Steve and Ken, and most of all to Gaetan Dupont-Panon. And I should probably add, to the Sunday Times for including me in last week's <a href='https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-alternative-honours-sunday-times-heroes-of-2021-mn2cjg6zh'>Alternative Honours List 2021</a>.</p> <p style='margin-top:30px'>Jamie</p>