Trane

Frequently Asked Questions: This optional section addresses the most common questions that interested parents and educators have when looking for the information on this page.

• What is deliberate practice?
  • Deliberate practice is a highly structured form of practice aimed at improving performance in a specific domain. It involves focused, goal-oriented activities designed to enhance skills, often under the guidance of a coach or tutor. Unlike regular practice, deliberate practice requires full concentration, immediate feedback, and is often mentally demanding.
• What is Trane?
  • Trane is a deliberate practice engine for optimizing the acquisition of complex skills. It is based on decades of research into optimal learning strategies and expert performance. Trane serves as an expert, personalized tutor by using proven strategies to provide a stream of exercises tailored to the student's current skill level and learning needs.
• Is there a software to learn to read and write based on deliberate practice?
  • Yes, Pictures Are For Babies uses Trane, a deliberate practice engine, to manage the entire process of mastering reading and writing from learning individual letters to college-level complexity and beyond.
• Do tutors need to understand deliberate practice to use Pictures Are For Babies?
  • No. Trane, the engine that powers it, implements all the strategies in the background. The tutor simply scores the student's performance and requests the next exercise. The system takes care of the rest.

Trane is a deliberate practice engine for optimizing the acquisition of complex skills. The idea came to me after buying a tenor saxophone. I was already learning guitar, so I had to be efficient if I wanted to add another instrument. As I drifted into daydreaming, I fantasized about how quickly I could learn if I had the great saxophonist John Coltrane as my personal tutor. In this scenario:

• John Coltrane is a master. Thanks to decades of practicing, he has mapped the entire domain from beginning to end. He has divided it into smaller skills, derived the relationships between them, and assigned exercises for each.
• He has perfect memory of all my practice sessions, knows exactly where I am in my journey, what I need to practice next, and what I need to review.
• All I have to do is show up and ask him for one exercise. As I continue my apprenticeship, he gradually moves me to more complex exercises. Over years of diligent practice, I become a master myself.

It seemed obvious that such a system should exist. The bad news was that no system that combined all of these strategies into a coherent whole was available, so I decided to build one myself. The good news was that plenty of research into optimal learning strategies has been done.

Trane is based on the principle of deliberate practice, the type of practice and strategies used by experts in disciplines like music, chess, and sports to reach the top of their fields. Trane uses a combination of these proven strategies to optimize learning. All of them are implemented in a way that the end-user does not have to be aware of them. They simply receive relevant exercises while the system uses these strategies, along with their previous results, to update its recommendations in the background. For general information about Trane, please visit the official website.

Pictures Are For Babies is the first full application of Trane, using its power to manage the process of mastering reading and writing from learning individual letters to reading and writing at college-level and beyond. With Trane, the entire curriculum and its relationships can be encoded with unprecedented detail. For example, fluent readers possess a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words they can instantly recognize. Until now, building this vocabulary has been a matter of sheer exposure to text over many years. This haphazard approach contrasts sharply with how experts in other fields acquire their skills through deliberate practice. Thanks to Trane, Pictures Are For Babies can track the development of this vocabulary in detail, using a curriculum that spans twenty-five levels, over 18,000 unique words, and thousands of sentences using them.

With the future inclusion of reading comprehension and writing tracks, Pictures Are For Babies will become the first complete literacy solution that ensures the development of all the skills required for true mastery of reading and writing.