ALPINE — Parent & Adult Guide

The tablet sentence-builder + the progress dashboard, explained as recipes. Written for an adult who hasn't touched the system in three weeks.

Maintenance rule: any change that alters an adult-facing flow (adult gate, practice mode, pack picker, sync, dashboard, pinning) must update this guide in the same change, including re-capturing any screenshot that changed.

Quick reference card

1. What you're looking at

The system has two halves:

• The tablet app (her side): she builds sentences by tapping picture tiles to describe a photo. It speaks, gently nudges on mistakes, and celebrates wins. Everything she does is recorded quietly in the background — nothing on her screen shows scores or data.
• The dashboard (your side): a web page on the PC where you and the SLP see her sessions, per-target progress, and download the data as CSV files.

The tablet is normally pinned — locked to the app so Home/Back can't leave it. She can't exit it, and neither can you without the guardian password (recipe 9).

Her screen. The photo on the left is the prompt; she builds "She is throwing a ball" by tapping tiles. The grey text at the bottom ("Symbols: ARASAAC…") is also the hidden adult gate — see recipe 2.

2. Opening the adult controls (the "adult gate")

There is no visible settings button — that's deliberate, so she never wanders into it.

1. Find the small grey attribution line at the bottom centre of the screen ("Symbols: ARASAAC (arasaac.org)…").
2. Press and hold it for 2 full seconds (a deliberate, slow hold — a normal tap does nothing).
3. The Adult settings sheet opens.

Everything an adult can do lives here: choose the session pack, install new packs, toggle Practice mode, pair the device, and sync.

Tap Close to return to her screen. The gate works even while the tablet is pinned.

3. Practice mode — ALWAYS before an adult touches the board

Why this matters: the app cannot tell whose fingers are tapping. Any build made without Practice mode ON is recorded as her learning data and pollutes her progress charts. (This has actually happened — 17 adult test builds once had to be surgically deleted from her records.)

Before you demo, test, or play:

1. Open the adult gate (recipe 2).
2. Tap "Practice mode — logged as adult practice". The row highlights.
3. Tap Close. A small "Practice" badge now floats on her screen — that badge is your confirmation that your taps are tagged as adult practice.

The toggle, switched on.

The badge on the builder screen. If you don't see it, your builds are being logged as hers.

When you're done: open the gate again and tap the toggle off (the badge disappears). Practice mode also switches itself off after 30 minutes as a safety net, and a build in progress when the mode flips is discarded rather than mis-attributed.

Practice builds still sync and appear on the dashboard — under the separate Practice tab, excluded from her metrics. They're useful as demos.

4. Moving her to the next map (or any other pack)

The app never advances on its own — an adult always makes the change. That's deliberate: one predictable change at a time, decided by a human.

1. Open the adult gate (recipe 2).
2. Under Session pack, tap the row you want:
3. Map 1 — free build: any grammatical sentence wins (no photo prompt).
4. Photo rotation: the built-in Map 1 photo pool (she/he + eating/throwing/washing + cup/apple/ball, 8 photos dealt in turn — never random, never twice in a row).
5. Map N — photo rotation: an installed map's photo pool, dealt the same way.
6. The sheet closes itself and the new pack is live immediately. The choice survives restarts.

When to advance: check the dashboard's evidence table first (recipe 7). The working reference is: a target is ready when she builds it ~90% independently across 3 sittings, on at least 2 different days — but the SLP owns this criterion; when in doubt, ask her. The gentlest first step up from Map 1 is Map 2 (identical sentence frame, new food words).

The full ladder is 15 maps (Map 2 food theme → Map 3 is/are → Map 4 possessives → … → Map 15 feelings). Details live in docs/sentence-builder/SCENARIO_LIBRARY.md.

5. Installing a new map's packs

New maps arrive as smp-*.zip files. Two ways to install:

The easy way (from the PC, tablet on the dock):

venv/Scripts/python.exe scripts/reset_tablet.py install map2

This pushes nothing new — the zips are already in the tablet's Downloads — it drives the installer for every map2/describe2 pack, then re-pins. Swap map2 for any map number. (The zips themselves are made with node apps/sentence-builder/scripts/export-pack.ts <packId> and pushed to the tablet's Downloads folder.)

The on-device way: the system file picker cannot open while pinned, so first unpin (recipe 9), then adult gate → Install pack from file… → pick the zip from Downloads → watch the status line confirm "Installed: …". Re-pin when done.

Installed packs appear as new rows in the Session pack list. Installing is safe to repeat — reinstalling the same pack changes nothing.

6. Syncing her data to the cloud

Her builds are stored on the tablet instantly (works fully offline) and mirrored to the cloud so the dashboard can see them.

• Sync happens automatically when the app launches.
• To force it: adult gate → Sync now. The status line reports Synced N · already mirrored N · failed N · remaining N.
• Pair device… is a one-time setup step (already done). You'd only use it again after a full tablet wipe — it needs the pairing file created by scripts/pair_device.py on the PC.

If sync fails, see recipe 10 — it's almost always the VPN.

7. Reading the dashboard

The dashboard runs on the PC (it is not on the public internet).

1. If it isn't already running, in a terminal at the project folder: pnpm --filter @alpine/dashboard dev
2. Open http://localhost:5173 in a browser.
3. Click Sign in with Google and use the authorized account (only the allow-listed account can read the data — anyone else is refused).

Two tabs:

• Her progress — her real sessions only: session log, per-map view, per-target evidence table and support-shift chart.
• Practice — adult practice builds only (recipe 3), clearly excluded from her metrics.

What a synced session looks like: the session log (duration, completed, abandoned), per-map view, and the export buttons. The "Her progress" tab has the same layout plus the per-target evidence sections.

How to read the evidence (the 30-second version): progress is measured as the support-shift — the share of builds she completes with no help rising over time — and speed past that ceiling, never as an accuracy score. "Insufficient data" labels are honest, not broken: the views refuse to imply evidence from too few builds. The dashboard reports; the SLP judges.

8. Getting data to the SLP

1. Dashboard → either tab → the Export buttons at the top:
2. trials.csv — one row per build (support level, timings, conditions).
3. taps.csv — every tap, long format (for deep analysis).
4. pack-registry.csv — what each pack contains (needed to interpret the other two).
5. The SLP reference values button shows the criterion defaults she may want to adjust.
6. Send all three CSVs — they are self-describing and carry version stamps.

9. Pinning and unpinning the tablet

Pinned = locked to the app: Home and Back do nothing, notifications can't intrude, she cannot leave (and nothing can interrupt her). The tablet is normally handed over pinned.

• Unpin on the tablet: hold Back + Recents together (the ⟨ and ||| buttons), then enter the guardian lock-screen password. She can't do this.
• Unpin from the PC: venv/Scripts/python.exe scripts/reset_tablet.py unpin
• Re-pin from the PC: venv/Scripts/python.exe scripts/reset_tablet.py pin
• Re-pin by hand: Recents (|||) → tap the app's icon at the top of its card → Pin this app → OK.

The invariant: always hand the tablet back to her pinned. The install script re-pins automatically; if you unpinned by hand, re-pin by hand.

10. When something is wrong

Wiping test data (careful): scripts/reset_tablet.py (no arguments) does a full reset — wipes the tablet journal and every installed pack, then reinstalls and re-pins. Use it only before a fresh counted session, never to fix a small mistake. Deleting a single bad session from the cloud is surgical and preferred — ask the agent.

Where things live (for the curious)