Trane

Trane is an automated practice system 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 good news was that plenty of research into optimal learning strategies has been done. The bad news was that no system that combined all of these strategies into a coherent whole was available, so I decided to build it myself.

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 a full description of these strategies, the research behind them, and how they are integrated with the most current research in literacy, read the pedagogy section. For general information about Trane, please visit the official website.