Kathie writes,

Good Morning Don,
We have a couple of classrooms in our elementary building (Aurora, IL) that are using Rocket Math via the app on iPads. If their iPads are wiped clean, will they lose their Rocket Math data or is that data stored within their account somewhere else?
Thanks! Kathie

Dr. Don answers,

Kathie,
Good question! Yes, the data is stored within the app on their iPads, so if you delete the current Rocket Math apps [Rocket Math Addition and Rocket Math Multiplication] you’ll delete the student information and they will have to start over at Set A.  Same thing if you have to uninstall and re-install them for some reason.

You can do this without upsetting the students if you warn them ahead of time. Especially good to do it over Christmas break so that students are aware they will have to start fresh in January. With the app students make pretty fast progress, so it would actually be beneficial for them to run through the sequence again and get all that extra practice.

We “break ground” this month on a web-based version of Rocket Math where we will keep the data in an account somewhere so this won’t happen. It will of course play through a browser and require an internet connection to do that, but we are working on it. When it is ready this spring we will announce it through Dr. Don’s Hints and Tips, so be sure to subscribe.