BoostChinese Classroom: bring the app into your school

For about a year, the same email kept landing in our inbox with small variations. A Chinese teacher would write: my students already use BoostChinese on their own — can I see how they're doing? Can I choose what they study? At some point the only reasonable answer was to build it. That's Classroom.

What it is, concretely

Classroom adds a group layer on top of the normal app. As a teacher you create a class, and the app generates an invite code. Students enter the code (or tap the link) and they're in — no forms, no student accounts to provision, and it works with the free version of the app.

From then on you get two abilities you didn't have: you decide what the class studies, and you see how it's going. Students keep the exact same app they already know.

Assigning work

Inside your class panel you can assign any deck from our catalog — HSK 1 to 9, food, travel, business, slang, a few hundred others — and it appears in every student's app as an assignment.

The part teachers end up using most, though, is custom decks. If week 12 of your syllabus covers directions and transport, you build a deck with exactly those words and assign it. Your students' Tuesday homework is now literally the vocabulary they'll need in Thursday's class, not whatever a generic app decided to serve them. Building a deck takes a few minutes; you can copy one from a previous year and edit it.

Reading the progress panel

Each student's row shows their reviews, accuracy and streak; each assigned deck shows how much of the class has it under control. It's the difference between asking "did everyone study?" into a silent room and just knowing.

Two patterns show up quickly. There's the quiet student cruising at 95% accuracy who never raises their hand — worth stretching. And there's a student whose accuracy has been sliding for two weeks and who was going to become a bad exam surprise in a month — worth five minutes after class now. That second case is honestly why the panel exists: the app catches the slide while there's still time to fix it.

What the app takes off your plate

Our position on the division of labour is simple. Drilling vocabulary until it's memorised — scheduling reviews, repeating audio, checking stroke order — is repetitive work an algorithm does patiently and well. So let the app do that part at home, through the same spaced repetition, videos and games every BoostChinese user gets.

What the app can't do is hold a conversation, explain culture, or hear that a tone is almost right and coax it the rest of the way. That's the part that needs you — and the part class time is finally free for when nobody has to spend it drilling word lists.

Trying it

Classroom exists because teachers asked, and it grows the same way — assignment scheduling and printable class reports are both on the way because specific teachers described exactly how they'd use them.

If you teach Chinese — school, academy, or private lessons — write to us through the contact page and we'll set your first class up with you. It usually takes about ten minutes, and we'd genuinely like to hear what your classroom needs next. 🏫