A question before
the answer.

The CricCuts Academy teaches school subjects through cricket. Physics through spin and swing. Maths and data through a scorecard. History through how the game spread. Health through training, food, sleep and nerves. How the brain works through how great batters watch the ball. It's written for students in Class 7 to 10, with a College level that adds practice tests for Class 11 and 12.

Cricket is the way in, not the point. A student who'd skip a chapter on forces will happily argue about why a spinner's ball dips. Our job is to turn that argument into understanding, and to do it honestly.

Most of the rules below came first, from what makes an explanation click. We checked them against the research afterwards, and where a rule lines up with a well-tested finding, I've named the study. Most of the rules are also checked by a computer: a lesson that breaks one fails a test and can't ship.

Next updateThe Science Lab is in the app today. The courses, the Brain Lab and the practice tests arrive with the next update, now in testing.

What we believe

A question before the answer

Socrates taught by asking. In Plato's Meno, he asks a boy who has never been taught geometry how to draw a square twice the size of another. The boy's first answers are wrong. Socrates doesn't correct him. He asks more questions, and the boy finds the answer himself.

An app can't do that. It can't hear a wrong answer and choose the next question. So we don't pretend to hold a dialogue. What we borrow from Socrates is the order: the question comes before the answer, and the student commits to something before we explain. It happens in three ways.

• Every lesson ends with a Quick check. One question, with the answer hidden until you tap. From the spin lessons: "Which kind of spin makes the ball dip, and which makes it turn off the pitch?" It isn't scored. It's there so you try to remember before you look.
• Think it through. Some lessons stop and ask you to decide. Every choice has its own reply, so you learn what's right or wrong about the one you picked, not just which one was right.
• Try it. A Science Lab lesson doesn't ask you to take its word. Tap ▶ Try it, and the simulator opens with the lesson's setup loaded, so you can change one thing and watch what happens.

Here's a Think it through from the Brain Lab:

History has its own version, "Your call", for judgements with no single right answer. Its replies say what happened, or what each choice would cost, and none of them is marked right.

Why it works. Trying to recall something strengthens memory more than reading it again. Psychologists call this the testing effect, or retrieval practice (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006). A large review of study techniques rated practice testing as one of the two most useful, along with spreading study out over time (Dunlosky and others, 2013). Even a question you get wrong before you're taught helps you learn the answer when it comes (Richland, Kornell and Kao, 2009).

The idea before the word

A new word and a new idea at the same time are two things to learn at once. So before a lesson uses a piece of jargon, a box teaches the idea in plain words: a 💡 Physics idea, a Body idea, a Data idea or a History idea. Only after that does the word appear in the lesson.

A computer checks this. Each idea box lists the words it teaches, and if a lesson uses one of them before its box, a test fails. Each lab also opens with a "Start here" toolkit: speed and units, force, Newton's first two laws, gravity and drag.

Why it works. Learning scientists call this pre-training. People understand an explanation better when they already know the names and behaviour of its parts (Mayer, Mathias and Wetzell, 2002). It's one way to keep the load on a student's working memory down (Sweller, 1988).

Start from what they've seen

Abstract ideas are easier to hold when they hang on something you've seen or done. So the lessons reach for things a student already knows:

Everything that spins turns around an imaginary line called its axis. A spinning top spins around an upright axis. A wheel spins around its axle.

Watch the smoke from an incense stick. Near the tip it rises in a smooth, neat thread: laminar flow. Higher up it breaks into swirls and curls: turbulent flow.

Pull back a catapult (a slingshot) and the rubber stores energy. Let go and it flings the stone.

The English names them plainly, so a lesson reads the same in Chennai, Pune or London. Each translation then uses the student's own word: a spinning top is a लट्टू in Hindi, a भोवरा in Marathi, a பம்பரம் in Tamil and a ಬುಗುರಿ in Kannada.

Formulas get the same treatment. Every formula on screen comes with the rule it states, in words: "twice the speed gives four times the sideways force." Every symbol is named, Greek letters are spelled out, and speeds come in km/h beside m/s, because km/h is what a scoreboard shows.

And the sentences are short. A test holds the lessons to an average of 18 words a sentence, and none over 40. That helps every reader, and most of all a student reading in their second language, or listening to the phone read the lesson aloud.

Play with it, build it

The Science Lab has three simulators: spin, swing and power hitting. Their numbers come from published research, and tests hold them to it. A lesson opens a simulator with a setup loaded, and the student changes one thing and watches what happens.

We're careful about what a simulator can't do. Each lab's last lesson is called "What this simulator leaves out", and it opens with: "Every model simplifies. Here is how this one does."

In the Forces on the field course, the student builds the picture. Each lesson has a free-body diagram to complete: pick the forces acting on the ball and point each one in one of eight directions, then check them against the answer. It's all taps, never a drag, so a student using a screen reader can do every step.

Why it works. Interactive simulations, used with some guidance, help students explore ideas that are hard to see (Wieman, Adams and Perkins, 2008, on the PhET simulations). And making something, such as a drawing, helps students learn more deeply than reading alone (Fiorella and Mayer, 2016).

Every claim has a source

A child will believe what a lesson says. So every figure in the Academy has a source, listed with its course, or it's labelled an estimate. The physics is held by tests to the papers it comes from: Mehta (2014) for swing, Robinson and Robinson for spin, and Peploe and others (2017) for bat speed.

Checking the sources changed the lessons. Several popular versions of facts turned out to be wrong or out of date:

• The soreness a day or two after exercise isn't lactic acid. The lesson says it plainly: "It isn't lactic acid." Your body clears it soon after you stop (Wilke and Behringer, 2021).
• Ice baths help adults a little at best. In footballers aged 15 to 19, cold water did no better than a placebo (Gustafsson and others, 2025).
• "Half of mental health conditions start by 14" is a popular line. The WHO and UNICEF figure is a third before 14, and half before 18 (2024).

Health lessons give general guidance, not medical advice, and never recommend supplements or diets. In History, a story with no record behind it is called a legend, and quotes are word for word from a checked source.

Where scientists disagree, we show the disagreement. Ericsson's research put deliberate practice, long hours of focused practice with feedback, at the centre of expertise (Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer, 1993). A later review found that practice explains only part of the differences between performers (Macnamara, Hambrick and Oswald, 2014). The "hot hand" was called a myth in 1985 (Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky), until two other researchers found a hidden mistake in that kind of count (Miller and Sanjurjo, 2018). The Brain Lab gives students both sides, and lets them think it through.

Teaching them how to learn

Some of the most useful lessons in the Academy aren't about cricket. They're about learning itself.

The Mind course has a lesson on cricket and exams. It tells students to spread their revision over days and weeks, like training sessions, instead of cramming, and to test themselves (Dunlosky and others, 2013). It explains why sleep matters for memory, too (Walker and others, 2002; Yoo and others, 2007).

The Brain Lab's Grow course goes further:

• Spread it out. Practice spread over several days beats the same practice crammed into one (Cepeda and others, 2006).
• Mix it up. Mixed practice sticks better than the same ball sixty times in a row, even though it feels harder at the time (Shea and Morgan, 1979).
• Know your limits. Working memory holds only about four things at once (Cowan, 2001), and experts see patterns where beginners see pieces (Chase and Simon, 1973).
• Skip the myths. People aren't "left-brained" or "right-brained" (Nielsen and others, 2013). Teaching to a student's "learning style" doesn't have the evidence behind it (Pashler and others, 2008). Listening to Mozart won't make you smarter (Chabris, 1999). Brain-training games make you better at the games, not at everything (Simons and others, 2016; Sala and Gobet, 2019).

The Academy tries to work the way it advises. Every lesson ends by testing you. The study reminder, if a student turns it on, brings them back on days they haven't studied, never on a day they already have, and backs off when they've been away for a while.

No IQ, no rank, no score on a child's batting

A parent might want an IQ for their child. The Brain Lab won't give one. An IQ compares you with everyone of your exact age, using a test first tried on a very large group. Our puzzles aren't that test, and puzzles don't raise general intelligence anyway. So the Brain Lab never shows an IQ, a percentile or a rank. It shows a skills profile instead: how you did in each skill on your own papers and puzzles, and what to practise next.

The same goes everywhere else. Quick checks and Think it through aren't scored. The practice tests for Class 11 and 12 are marked the way JEE Main is, +4 for a right answer and −1 for a wrong one, because that's what exam practice is for. They're papers we wrote, not official ones, and every question comes back with a worked solution. And CricCuts never puts a score on a child's batting.

A child's learning record stays on their phone. For under-18s, nothing about how they use the app is sent to us.

In their own language

The lessons are in English first, with Hindi, Marathi, Tamil or Kannada one tap away, and the phone reads them aloud in either. The English cricket and science words stay beside the student's own, because learning those words is part of the point. The translations are drafts, and we'd welcome a teacher's corrections. How we got there, after a phone's translator turned the batter into thunder, is its own story.

What we haven't proved

Here's the honest part.

• No teacher, doctor or umpire has reviewed the Academy yet. Every figure comes from a published source, but that isn't the same as an expert's read. We've built a review form for exactly that, and every lesson in the app has a Suggest a change button.
• We haven't measured learning. The rules above line up with good research, but nobody has yet tested whether students learn more from these lessons than from a textbook. That would need a proper trial with a school.
• An app's question is a fixed question. It can't notice how a student went wrong and ask the right next question, the way a good teacher does. The Academy is built to sit beside a teacher, not to replace one.
• The newest courses are in English only for now. They'll be translated after a reviewer has read them.

Sources

On learning:

• Plato, Meno (the geometry lesson with the boy).
• Roediger, H. L. & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.
• Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J. & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.
• Richland, L. E., Kornell, N. & Kao, L. S. (2009). The pretesting effect: do unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 15(3), 243–257.
• Mayer, R. E., Mathias, A. & Wetzell, K. (2002). Fostering understanding of multimedia messages through pre-training. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 8(3), 147–154.
• Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285.
• Wieman, C. E., Adams, W. K. & Perkins, K. K. (2008). PhET: simulations that enhance learning. Science, 322(5902), 682–683.
• Fiorella, L. & Mayer, R. E. (2016). Eight ways to promote generative learning. Educational Psychology Review, 28(4), 717–741.

From the lessons themselves (each course lists all of its sources in the app):

• Cepeda, N. J. and others (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: a review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354–380.
• Shea, J. B. & Morgan, R. L. (1979). Contextual interference effects on the acquisition, retention, and transfer of a motor skill. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 5(2), 179–187.
• Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87–114.
• Chase, W. G. & Simon, H. A. (1973). Perception in chess. Cognitive Psychology, 4(1), 55–81.
• Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T. & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406.
• Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z. & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: a meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1608–1618.
• Gilovich, T., Vallone, R. & Tversky, A. (1985). The hot hand in basketball: on the misperception of random sequences. Cognitive Psychology, 17(3), 295–314.
• Miller, J. B. & Sanjurjo, A. (2018). Surprised by the hot hand fallacy? A truth in the law of small numbers. Econometrica, 86(6), 2019–2047.
• Nielsen, J. A. and others (2013). An evaluation of the left-brain vs. right-brain hypothesis with resting state functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging. PLoS ONE, 8(8), e71275.
• Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D. & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning styles: concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105–119.
• Chabris, C. F. (1999). Prelude or requiem for the "Mozart effect"? Nature, 400, 826–827.
• Simons, D. J. and others (2016). Do "brain-training" programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(3), 103–186.
• Sala, G. & Gobet, F. (2019). Cognitive training does not enhance general cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(1), 9–20.
• Walker, M. P. and others (2002). Practice with sleep makes perfect: sleep-dependent motor skill learning. Neuron, 35(1), 205–211.
• Yoo, S.-S., Hu, P. T., Gujar, N., Jolesz, F. A. & Walker, M. P. (2007). A deficit in the ability to form new human memories without sleep. Nature Neuroscience, 10(3), 385–392.
• Mehta, R. D. (2014). Fluid mechanics of cricket ball swing. 19th Australasian Fluid Mechanics Conference.
• Robinson, G. & Robinson, I. (2016). Spin-bowling in cricket re-visited: model trajectories for various spin-vector angles. Physica Scripta.
• Peploe, C., McErlain-Naylor, S., Harland, A. & King, M. (2017). Relationships between hitting technique and ball carry distance in cricket. ISBS Proceedings, Cologne.
• Wilke, J. & Behringer, M. (2021). Is "delayed onset muscle soreness" a false friend? The potential implication of the fascial connective tissue in post-exercise discomfort. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 22(17), 9482.
• Gustafsson, J. and others (2025). Cold- and hot-water immersion are not more effective than placebo for the recovery of physical performance and training adaptations in national level soccer players. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 125(11), 3179–3194.
• World Health Organization & UNICEF (2024). Guidance to improve access to mental health care for children and young people. News release, 9 October 2024.

Related reading: what a phone's translator did to our lessons, learning from watching yourself, and values, not side effects. More on the CricCuts blog.