App guide
Staff Spot
Name the note. Place the note. Staff Spot shows one note on a staff and asks for its name — or shows a name and asks you to put the note where it belongs. Treble, bass, or both clefs together, with no account and nothing to install.
- Build
0.3.0- Open the app
- staffspot.backwerdrhythmshop.com
- Account or install
- None
- Cost
- Free
Your first round
- Open the app and press Start round. The defaults are a treble-clef, staff-only, naturals-only round of ten questions, answered by letter name.
- A note appears on the staff under the prompt Name this note. Choose its letter from the answer buttons. The app tells you whether you were right, then Next question moves on.
- After the last question the Round complete card shows the score against the round's passing mark, what was measured, and a local exit ticket.
No timer, ever. A round is scored on accuracy under its stated conditions. Speed is not measured and never gates a result.
Round settings
Change settings opens the panel. Every control is a row of buttons, so the current choice is always visible.
| Setting | Choices | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | Staff → Note · Note → Staff · Mixed | Whether you name the written note, place a named note on the staff, or meet both kinds in one round. |
| Clef | Treble · Bass · Mixed | Which staff the questions use. Mixed changes the clef from question to question, so the clef has to be read every time. |
| Range | Staff only · One ledger line · Extended | How far above and below the five lines a note may sit. |
| Steps | Lines and spaces · Lines only · Spaces only | Restricts a round to one kind of position while the class is still learning them apart. |
| Accidentals | Naturals · + Sharps · + Flats · All | Whether sharps and flats appear, and which. |
| Answer rule | Letter · Letter + accidental · + Octave | How exact an answer has to be: a letter, the written spelling, or scientific pitch notation such as C4. |
| Questions | 5 · 8 · 10 · 12 · 16 · 20 | The length of the round. |
In Note → Staff rounds the staff itself is the answer: every valid line, space and ledger position is a large target, and the keyboard can move a notehead up or down and confirm it. Accidentals are chosen separately from the position, and feedback says which part was wrong — the letter, the register, or the accidental.
Teaching Sequences
Nine short ladders, four levels each, picked by clef and skill rather than worked as one long course. Each level is a locked round with its own address and a stated passing threshold, and the four run from an introduction to a check:
- Treble Foundations, Treble Reading, Treble Note Placement, Treble Ledger Notes, and Treble Accidentals.
- Bass Foundations, Bass Reading, and Bass Note Placement.
- Mixed-Clef Reading, where the staff can change from one question to the next.
Open them from Teaching Sequences in the app, or from the Teaching Sequences hub, which lists all nine with their level counts and round lengths. Thresholds are reported, never enforced: a level says what it expects, the result card says whether that was met, and no level is held shut.
Progress stays in this browser. The sequences page keeps each level's best score, attempts and completion date in local storage and nothing else. Reset local sequence progress clears it.
Assign a locked round
All Assignments lists every locked activity in the catalog, including the ones the sequences use. Filter by clef, direction, skill and level, then copy a link into Canvas, Google Classroom, or your LMS. A student who opens it sees an Assigned round banner naming the pinned conditions and a single Start assignment button — the settings panel is not offered, so every student runs the round you set.
The conditions a link can lock are the direction, clef, range, steps, accidentals, answer rule, question count, passing threshold, and seed. The same seed gives every student the same question pool; the order of answer choices may still vary.
Read the result
The Round complete card separates Measured from Not measured. Staff Spot measures line-versus-space discrimination, pitch-name recognition, staff-position construction, clef-specific reading, and — when the round asks for them — register and accidentals. It does not measure keyboard location, live playing, tone, sticking, tempo, or sight-reading fluency under performance conditions, and it cannot verify who was at the keyboard.
The local exit ticket records the assignment, its conditions, the score, the attempt count and the app version. Copy exit ticket and Download .txt are the only ways it leaves the device; nothing submits on its own.
Print a worksheet
Any sequence level can be printed as a sheet: open /worksheet?level=… with the level's id, or follow the Print the worksheet link on the Note Names, Staff Road Map and Grand Staff lessons, which point at the level each one teaches. On the sheet, Word bank prints the letter names across the top, One per row spreads the items out for younger writers, Answer key swaps in the teacher copy, and Print / Save PDF sends it to the printer. The same flags work in the address: &bank=1 and &key=1.
Keyboard and accessibility
Both directions have a full keyboard flow, every staff position is a labeled control, and the clef, position, accidental and result are all described for a screen reader. Nothing relies on colour alone; focus is visible; motion is reduced when the system asks for it; the notation scales with the page.
Privacy
Staff Spot has no account, no roster, no cloud progress and no student-data backend. There is no microphone, camera or recording. Settings, sequence progress and results stay in the browser's local storage on the device, and an exit ticket goes only where the student sends it. This guide page, like every page on the shop, carries the Cloudflare Web Analytics beacon that counts page views and nothing else.
Help and feedback
- Report a problem: support@backwerdrhythmshop.com
- Request a feature: feedback@backwerdrhythmshop.com
Include the app name, the build from the app's footer, the page URL, your browser, what you expected, and what happened.
Put a note on the staff.
Ten questions, one clef, no account.