Can a child be a coach for another child?

Hi Ted,

Child accounts for users registered as under 13, or registered as child accounts without age information, cannot coach other users. They do not have the Coach dashboard option in their settings.

I can understand that between siblings in a home settings this feature could be useful. However, in a school setting there is concern with the amount of information that will become available if students were coaching each other. Coaches basically have access to information about what a child is working on, when the child is working, and how well or poorly they are doing. They can also load another child's account with recommendations which might swamp recommendations from the school teacher, so there are good reasons for not having this ability generally available to young students.

When your eldest turns 13 it's a different matter. Hopefully he will still want to coach!

(volunteer Star Guide)

Hi Ted!

We had some 6th graders get together for a "math club" and help each other.  

• While they weren't technically coaching each other through Khan's dashboard, they encouraged each other to keep the streak going and they'd login and show each other what they were working on.  So, informal encouragement helped a lot.  (When one son goes on boy scout camping trips he asks me to login & do a few problems (wrong) to keep his streak going)
• Also the older sibling could ask him to see if he has any "reds" and encourage him to tackle those.  If he's having trouble one of you can use the knowledge map https://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard to figure out what precursors he skipped.
• He can also encourage him (or her) to master everything at a lower level before going to the next one.  
• My kids don't really like more than a few recommendations through the dashboard at a time anyway.