How it works
Every coin has three signatures behind it.
EdgeUCoin runs one program: eighteen weeks in which students set three goals, adults verify the work behind them, and coins follow the change that was actually measured. This page is the mechanism, step by step.
The loop
Earn, verify, redeem, eighteen times.
The same three steps run every week of the program. What changes across the eighteen weeks is the size of the goals and how much of the work a student is driving themselves.
Earn.
Every student sets goals in three areas: academics, behavior, and one goal worked on at home. Coins come from real, measured improvement against that student’s own starting point, not from promises and not from where they began.
What is actually measured
Three goals, one academic, one behavior, and one worked on at home. Each is measured against where that student stood in week 1, never against the class, so a student who starts behind can earn everything a student who starts ahead can. Coins follow measured movement on those goals. Nothing is earned for attendance at a session.
Verify.
This is the SET model, and it’s what makes a coin mean something. Three roles keep a coin honest. The Student does the work. On the school side, a teacher signs off the weekly goals and a facilitator confirms the workbook and sets the coins. At home, a parent or family member confirms the family goal. No self-report, and no single adult carrying it alone.
Who has to sign, and in what order
A student records the week in their workbook. A teacher signs off the weekly goals, a facilitator confirms the workbook, and at home a parent or another named family adult confirms the home goal. The school side and the home side are separate on purpose: no one adult can release a coin alone, and no coin rests on a student saying it happened.
Redeem.
Coins become real rewards a student chose and worked toward. The reward follows the growth. It never comes first.
What a student can do with them
Coins go toward a reward the student chose at the start and worked toward for weeks. Spending is a real choice with a real consequence: coins spent are gone, and the bigger reward moves further away. The reward always trails the effort, which is the whole design.
The SET model
Student, Educator, Parent.
SET is three roles, and every coin passes through all three of them. The educator side is two people rather than one, because the person who knows whether a goal moved is not always the person who reads the workbook.
Student
50%of what a student can earn
The workbook is the student's own record of the week, and it is the largest single source of coins by design. The work has to exist before anybody can verify it.
Educator
30%of what a student can earn
Two people, one school side. A teacher signs off the weekly goals against what they actually saw, and a facilitator confirms the workbook and sets the coins. Neither can do the other's half.
Parent
20%of what a student can earn
One yes or no each week, on the goal the student works on at home. It is weighted lowest deliberately, so that a student whose family cannot take part is never locked out of the program by somebody else's week.
What a coin is, and what it is not.
A coin is a record that three people confirmed a student did something they said they would do.
It is not currency. Coins are never converted into anything, they are never traded between students, and the only thing they can be exchanged for is a reward from the list a student chose from at the start.
Goals
Three goals, locked in week 3.
The first weeks are for finding the right goals rather than for guessing at them in week 1 and living with it for four months.
Weeks 1 to 3, discovery.
A student sets a provisional starter goal in week 1 and works on it while they figure out what a real goal looks like for them. Those weeks count. They are the first thing a family verifies, which builds the weekly habit before it carries weight.
Week 3, the goals lock.
Three goals are set for the rest of the program: one academic, one behavior, and one worked on at home. Locking them is the point. A goal that can be swapped whenever it gets hard is a wish, and the eighteen weeks are built around the same three goals getting harder rather than easier.
A family adult co-signs the home goal.
At lock-in, a parent or guardian endorses the goal their student will work on at home, and can ask for a different one. It is an endorsement rather than a formality: the person confirming the goal every week is the person who agreed to it.
If nobody co-signs, the student is not held back.
Lock-in goes ahead, and the weekly confirmation passes to the facilitator or to another family adult the student names. A student never waits on an adult who is not there.
A missed week is a clean slate.
A no, or a week where nobody confirms anything at home, costs that week and nothing else. Nothing carries forward, and nothing is deducted later. The next week starts even.
What happens next
The mechanism only matters if somebody runs it.
Every part of this needs people: a school willing to give the eighteen weeks a place in the timetable, funders willing to stock the rewards students work toward, and adults willing to sign for the work they actually saw.