My daughter asked why her stars kept starting from zero

25 July 2026 · by Larry

"Papa, why is my score zero again?"

She had been collecting stars in the maths games for days. Then she picked up the tablet one evening and everything was back to nothing. She wasn't upset exactly — more puzzled, the way children are when a grown-up's thing doesn't behave. But she'd stopped trusting it, and once a child stops trusting the score, the score stops being a reason to play.

So I went looking. And the cause turned out to be my own mistake.

Two front doors to the same house

StudyLab saves your child's stars in the browser itself, on your own device. Nothing is sent anywhere. That was deliberate, and I still think it's the right default for a children's site.

What I hadn't accounted for is that a browser files that saved data under the exact web address you arrived at. And my site answered to two: studylab.sg and www.studylab.sg. To you and me those are the same place. To a browser they are two different houses with two different cupboards.

She had been earning stars at one address and looking for them at the other.

Whichever link she happened to tap decided which pile of stars she saw. That is a one-line fix on the server — everything now goes to a single address — and it has been fixed. But it left me with a bigger question I'd been avoiding.

The honest problem with keeping everything on the device

Even with the addresses sorted out, saving only on the device has real limits, and they are worth saying out loud rather than pretending they don't exist:

• Stars earned on the iPad are not the stars on your phone. They are separate, always.
• Clear your browsing data — something plenty of us do without thinking — and the progress is gone.
• Some phones quietly tidy away stored data for sites you haven't visited in a while.

None of that matters for a worksheet. It matters a lot when a seven-year-old has been proudly counting up to sixty stars.

So I added a name — and nothing else

Your child can now make a nickname and a password on the front page. That's the entire sign-up. There is no email box, because I don't want your email. There's no birthday box, no school, no class, no real name. The app tells her in plain words to pick a nickname rather than her own name.

What that account actually holds is this short list:

• the nickname she chose
• her password, scrambled so that even I cannot read it
• how many stars she has, and which level she's practising

That's it. No email address, no real name, no age, no school, and no record of your IP address. Her answers and her mistakes still never leave the device — those stay on your tablet exactly as before. What travels is a number of stars attached to a made-up name.

I kept it that short on purpose. Every P1 to P6 child is under 13, and a child that age can't give meaningful consent to anything. The safest way to handle children's data is to not be holding it. So the only thing I let the account know is the thing she actually asked for: her stars, wherever she plays.

The part I had to think hardest about

Because there's no email, there is no "forgot password" email to send. So when the account is made, the app shows a one-time recovery code and asks the grown-up to save it. That's a small inconvenience I chose on purpose — the alternative is collecting an email from every family, and I'd rather hand you a code to keep in your notes app.

There's also a score chart now, because the very next thing she asked was whether she could see how she was doing against her friends. It shows nicknames and star counts, overall and level by level. Nothing else about anybody appears on it.

And playing still needs no account at all. If you'd rather your child never signs up, every game works exactly as before, saved on your device. The account only exists to answer her original question.

While I was in there: harder questions, not just more of them

The other thing I changed has nothing to do with accounts.

Lower primary is largely about getting quick and accurate. Upper primary isn't. By P4 the difficulty stops being "can you do the sum" and becomes "can you work out which sums to do, in what order, and does your answer even make sense". That's what problem sums really test, and it's where children who are perfectly good at arithmetic start to come unstuck.

So P4, P5 and P6 each have a new set called Think It Through — deliberately multi-step questions. Spend-then-compare. A fraction of the remainder, not of the original. Percentages worked backwards from the final price. Finding a missing test mark from an average.

More importantly, every one of those questions now explains itself after she answers — whether she got it right or wrong. Not just the answer: the working, why that method works, the trap most children fall into, and a check at the end to see if the answer is sensible. Something like:

The word remainder is the whole question. The second fraction is taken from what was left, not from the $60 she started with.

I added that because a lucky guess and real understanding look identical on a score sheet. If she gets one right without knowing why, I want the app to tell her why anyway. And if she gets it wrong, I'd rather she reads two lines that make it click than simply be told "wrong" and moved along.

Rounds also size themselves now — shorter for the little ones, a bit longer when she's on a roll, shorter again on a day when she's struggling, so she finishes and ends on a win.

Why I'm writing this down

Partly because a bug that only shows up as "my score is gone" is worth explaining to the other parents using this. And partly because "she asked me a question and I couldn't give a good answer" is how nearly everything here gets built. She asked why her stars kept vanishing. She asked if she could see her friends' scores. Both are in the app now.

If your child asks you something StudyLab can't answer yet, there's a feedback button on every page and it comes straight to me. That's genuinely how this list gets written.

— Larry