The Formative Check mascot, a smiling green check badge

It's official: Formative Check is now on the App Store.

Download Formative Check on the App Store

I'm a primary teacher who taught myself to build apps in the evenings and on weekends, so seeing one of them sitting in the App Store next to the apps I download for my own classroom still feels a bit unreal. Android is on the way too. More on that at the end.

What Formative Check actually is

Formative Check is a tap-to-mark assessment gradebook. You set up a lesson with the skills you're looking for, pull up your class, and as you walk the room you just tap to record what you see. Each cell cycles through with a tap (Yes, No, or Flag for anything in between), and if you want finer detail, you can drop in numeric or rubric scores instead.

The Formative Check marking grid on iPad, showing students marked with tap-to-cycle Got it, Not yet and Flag marks

That's the whole idea: capture what you're already observing without breaking your teaching flow. No paper checklist that gets lost. No transcribing notes into a spreadsheet at the end of the day. You tap as you go, and the data's there when you need it: for planning, for catching the student who's quietly slipping, for report time.

It's built around the Australian Curriculum, with a skill bank ready to use, and your data is stored in Australia. Students don't need devices or logins. It's a tool for your observations, not another thing for the kids to juggle.

And because it's all captured as you go, the patterns surface on their own: who's flying, who needs another look, which skills the whole class hasn't landed yet.

Formative Check class analytics showing each student's observation count and success rate

I'd recommend it on an iPad

You can use Formative Check on your phone or at your desk on a laptop, and it syncs across all of them. But it really comes into its own on an iPad. Holding a tablet while you circulate, tapping a grid as you check in with each table. That's the workflow it was designed for, and it's the way I use it every day.

The road to the App Store

Building the app was the part I expected to be hard. Getting it through the App Store turned out to be its own adventure.

If you've never done it, the short version is: Apple reviews every app before it goes live, and they're thorough. There was a fair bit of back-and-forth: tweaking details, clarifying how things worked, resubmitting, waiting. As a solo teacher-developer doing this around a full teaching load, each round of review felt like a long time. But every bit of it pushed the app to be a little more polished than it would have been otherwise.

When the "Ready for Sale" email finally landed, I may have done a small lap of the kitchen.

How to get it (and what it costs)

Formative Check is free to start, with no credit card needed. The free plan covers a couple of classes and a few active lessons with standard Yes / No / Flag marking and the curriculum skill bank, genuinely enough to use it in your room.

If you want more, Pro unlocks unlimited classes and lessons, numeric and rubric scoring, full analytics and heat maps, CSV and PDF exports, student portfolios, and Google Classroom import. It comes with a 30-day free trial, so you can see whether it earns its place before paying anything.

Android is next

The most common question I get is "is there an Android version?" The answer is: it's coming. The web app already works on Android right now if you'd like to start, and a proper Android app is the next thing on my list.

If you give Formative Check a go, I'd genuinely love to hear what works and what doesn't. Every bit of teacher feedback so far has shaped where it's headed.

If you want the longer thinking behind why I built it this way, I wrote about formative assessment without the paperwork. That post is basically the problem this app exists to solve.