Austin Scholar #177: The Alpha App Stack

& what apps you should use for your kid

Hey, y'all!

This week from Austin Scholar...

1. The Alpha App Stack

It’s officially my favorite time of the year: baseball week. Every year, my dad and I go to Dallas for a week or two and watch Rangers games every single day. As I talked about in my newsletter a couple of years ago (yes, this summer trip has pretty much become a tradition), our time in Dallas is a great opportunity to connect with my dad in a way that can be hard back in Austin, where there are so many distractions taking our attention. But at a baseball game, I can talk to him about the books I’m reading or shows I’m watching and he has no ability to escape from me :)

I highly recommend that every parent finds some time every year to create traditions with your kid. It may seem cheesy at first (especially to a teenager), but these traditions can become a strong foundation for your relationship and ensure that your kid knows that they’re a priority in your life. For more insight into how to create these traditions, definitely check out the newsletter where I first talk about our annual baseball week.

---

The Alpha App Stack

The Alpha school year starts this week, and because Alpha is radically transforming its academic apps this year, I thought that it would be the perfect time to write my most requested article: which AI-powered, learning science-backed, online apps does Alpha use?

The most important thing to start with is that Alpha is rolling out a new academic platform, TimeBack, for the 2025-26 school year.

TimeBack is a $100m+ project to build an AI platform that allows students to learn 10x faster than sitting in a classroom in standard school.

The team that built TimeBack includes a unique combination of the world's best learning scientists, AI/LLM experts, SaaS/Cloud app developers and student-obsessed educators.

Parts of TimeBack have rolled out over the last couple years, but this year Alpha is switching all academic learning to the entire stack. The changes are substantial, both to the platform itself and to the user experience for the students.

Let’s dive in!

To start their days, students review their Dash homepage (which is basically a summary of all of their academic goals for the year, broken down into daily and weekly chunks) to identify what they need to accomplish that day. This is measured through XP.

The concept of XP (Experience Points) is well known from popular video games. XP provides a granular measure of progress and leveling up. For Alpha students, 1 XP = 1 minute of productive learning time (as measured by the vision model that I outline in this newsletter). Every student should earn 120 XP per day (the equivalent of 2 hours of productive learning time per day).

The best part of this page, though, is in the top left corner. TimeBack measures exactly how much time each student has been given back by using this platform to learn instead of a traditional classroom – faster academics means more time saved for other things. This metric is extremely motivating for students because they can see just how much time they are saving by using TimeBack.

TimeBack also has an overall progress section, where students can see how long it will take them to complete each subject grade level.

By just doing 25 minutes of productive learning per day, students can finish entire grade levels in just four or five months. Not only is this just a generally motivating metric but, for students who come into Alpha behind in their learning, it’s especially so. They’re not literally years behind with TimeBack, merely a couple of months. And if they’re willing to do a little bit of homework, even students who enter significantly behind grade level may only need weeks to catch up. It makes the daunting task of catching up seem quick and manageable.

TimeBack also includes five Alpha-created AI learning apps for students: AlphaRead, AlphaWrite, AlphaLearn, AlphaMath Fluency, and TeachTales (more details on these later in this article). These applications use AI-generated content to create personalized learning pathways for each student. For the rest of 2025, the Alpha apps will use static content (content that is pre-generated, checked by a human, then given to the students by the app) but soon they will transition to dynamically-generated content (content that is generated in real-time for the student) in 2026.

Alpha uses a list of other apps nested inside of the TimeBack system for instruction in different subjects. Some of them are proprietary to Alpha, and some are independent tools the school licenses. Here are the apps used for each subject:

Math

K-3

• Synthesis

Synthesis a very engaging but niche app. It offers a limited curriculum and practice and is light on learning science. However, the Synthesis interactive learning widgets do a very good job at teaching math concepts in a compelling way. The new Synthesis AI tutor garners mixed reviews, with advanced students feeling it slows them down. Overall, Synthesis is less structured than Alpha would like, so it has been integrated into the Timeback platform with modifications to help the student stay focused with Alpha’s motivational models.

• AlphaMath Fluency

Learning your math facts to fluency (e.g. memorizing your multiplication tables) is a critical skill that many schools have simply stopped teaching. We have found that Alpha students with the best math fluency learn 2.5x faster while those who don't have fluency learn at just 0.8x the baseline speed.

4-12

• Math Academy

This is the best math app available today. It has been developed with a deep understanding of learning science. In fact, one of the best learning science books for parents is the Math Academy Way. Students love Math Academy’s worked examples (sample problems that include step-by-step solutions). With Math Academy, the Alpha team expects students to achieve higher mastery with 20% fewer hours.

Reading

Alpha’s reading curriculum is one of the best examples of the benefits of using AI in education. For grades 3-8, Alpha uses a three step progression. The first app is AlphaRead, the next is TeachTales, and then, finally, long-form physical books.

• AlphaRead

AlphaRead is the best way to accelerate your reading. It uses AI-generated short form articles tailored to individual students. This ensures that the difficulty level continuously stays within 10% of the student's capability, which means the content will not be too easy, nor too hard.

Then, the app engages the reader with both guiding and reading comprehension questions. It allows the student to receive ten times more feedback and practice than traditional methods, which then improves their reading five times faster than simply sitting down with a book would.

The AI-generated articles also include the 5,000+ facts, topics, and concepts from E.D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge curriculum to make sure Alpha students know the history, science, civics, literature, and art touchpoints that have traditionally served as the sign of an educated student.

• TeachTales

While AlphaRead is the fastest way to learn, TeachTales is built to foster a love of reading. It’s inspired by the famous concept: read what you love until you love to read. The main design goal is to move students from short-form reading to long-form engagement. The TeachTales team measures how long the students stay engaged as their primary metric of success. They want students to become "lost in reading" for hours at a time.

The TeachTales app was initially inspired by a third grade boy who "hates books". TeachTales will ask such a student what is your favorite movie? (The Avengers) and who are your soccer buddies? (Noah, Oliver, Charlie). It will then create a “choose your own adventure” story for the student and his particular friends to save the world. It makes sure the Lexile difficulty level is at the student’s current capability. After each section, the reader can drive the story where they wish.

• Physical books

Once students have become excellent readers who also love to read, it’s time to get them into classic physical books. This is reflected in Alpha’s grade level “check chart” (requirements to move to the next grade) reading lists.

For the younger students, Alpha uses a few outside apps to teach the kids the basics of how to read.

Kindergarteners through third graders use Mentava, Lalilo, and ClearFluency.

High school students, on the other hand, also use AlphaRead, but the app will increase the difficulty of the articles to ensure coverage and capability with the goal of achieving a perfect 800 English SAT score.

Language

For language learning, Alpha students use the AlphaLearn Language program for the majority of their time at Alpha (grades three through twelve). From 6th-12th grade, students expand their vocabulary with Membeam (if you’re wondering, it’s about 4,000+ words to be considered proficient). Finally, from 6th-8th grade, students will use eGUMPP to learn grammar.

Writing

ChatGPT is already destroying writing in K-12 education. Students just type in prompts, modify the output so they don't get flagged for cheating, and then hand it in. Alpha's use of AI to teach writing is the opposite of this new but terrible status quo.

Personally, I believe that writing is thinking. Writing is one of the most effective ways to summarize knowledge, build internal mental models and communicate your thoughts. Alpha won’t let AI destroy this crucial connection between writing and thinking.

3-8

• AlphaWrite

AlphaWrite is modeled after the book The Writing Revolution. It uses a mastery-based system where students first learn how to write sentences, then paragraphs, and then essays. Students receive at least ten times the amount of practice and feedback from AlphaWrite versus the traditional method: “turn in your paper and get delayed feedback from the teacher.”

Alpha High has become a writing powerhouse thanks to an adaptation of David Perell's Write of Passage course. The plan is to plant the seeds for writing excellence early, starting in 3rd grade, using AlphaWrite.

Science

For grades 3-5, Alpha uses MobyMax, and for grades 6-8, students use Khan Academy. There’s not a lot of content learned in pre-high school science education, so most students can master each grade level in 20 hours or less.

Measuring Results

How do we know if these apps work? Alpha uses the NWEA MAP (a nationwide standardized exam) test to measure learning for the students. Here is the link that shows Alpha delivers the best academics in the country in only 2 hours per day.

2025 Update: MAP updates its benchmark tables every five years. Up until now, Alpha has been using the 2020 benchmarks. However, NWEA recently released their 2025 benchmarks and the school will switch to those.

Unfortunately, most students in the USA have been learning less over the last five years, so the MAP percentile scores dropped (e.g. the 50th percentile student in 2020 would’ve gotten a 220 score in math, but in 2025 the 50th percentile student would get a 215).

Alpha’s TimeBack will not be lowering its mastery standards, so Alpha students’ achievement percentiles should increase.

Availability outside of Alpha

Finally, in anticipation of the most frequently asked question after reading this article: ”When will these tools be available to homeschoolers or parents who don’t live near a physical Alpha?” TimeBack for homeschool use is launching in 2026.

However, though everyone cares about the Alpha “app stack”, that’s not truly what causes Alpha students to learn so well. Here’s a quote from the viral Astral Codex article written by an Alpha parent:

“For the 3.5 months I signed the kids up to iXL…[i]t did not go well. We tried getting the kids to work on it for about an hour per day, but it was a fight every time. It was the same content they would be doing at [Alpha], but without the [Alpha] structure, and it did not work.

But once the kids started at [Alpha], those same iXL lessons became a game for them.”

Don’t focus on the app, focus on the motivation. That being said, you can use apps like Synthesis, MathAcademy, Mentava, Membeam, and other non-Alpha-created apps today.

Additionally, if you’re interested in the learning science behind these apps and more on how Alpha uses AI, check out the newsletter I wrote last week in response to the New York Times article about Alpha.

---

Thanks for reading. Go crush the week! See y'all on Sunday.