Working offline

Offline in Ten Points means a write queue, not a cache. You can keep awarding with no signal; you cannot keep reading.

What works

Awards. Tap as you would normally – the child, the value, the number, Award. Each one is held on the device and sent when you are back in range, and an award that gets sent twice by a flaky connection still only counts once.

The time recorded is the moment you tapped, not the moment it arrived, so a lesson’s worth of recognition made in a field on a Tuesday lands on Tuesday afternoon in every report.

What does not

Reading. No class lists, no running totals, no child’s history, no journals. If you open Ten Points on a train with nothing in range, there is nothing to look at.

This is the part people are surprised by, so it is worth being plain about: it is not a limitation we intend to lift. Nothing about a child is stored on a device for later. That means there is no cache to clear when a tablet is handed on, no expiry to configure, and nothing on a lost phone.

What this means in practice

Plan around the reading, not the writing. If you need the register for a trip, take it on paper. If you need to recognise thirty children on a beach, Ten Points will cope.

Do not wait for the queue. There is nothing to press. The awards go when the signal comes back, whether or not the app is open at the time.

A device that never comes back online never sends its queue. If a tablet is lost between the trip and the return, those awards are gone – they were never anywhere else. That is rare enough not to plan around, and real enough to know.

If you are designing a process around this

If you find yourself planning an expiry, a purge, or a “clear the offline data” step for your school’s device policy, you have gone one step further than the product needs. There is no offline data about children to purge.