Progression, visibility, and the parent loop are starting to connect

A lot of educational products stop at "the student answered correctly". That is not enough for PlayPath. If we want the game loop to feel alive for kids and still be legible to adults, we need progression to be visible from multiple angles: what improved, what is getting shaky, what is coming next, and whether the student is staying in a productive zone of challenge.

The recent work in the repo moves us closer to that. Instead of treating mastery as a hidden implementation detail, we are starting to expose it in product surfaces that parents, teachers, and admins can actually use.

On the parent side, the new progression view now combines four useful frames into one place. There is a weekly summary for sessions, play time, unlocked skills, mastered skills, and breakthroughs. There is a "What's Next" panel that estimates readiness for upcoming skills based on prerequisites already in motion. There is a DAG-style skill tree visualization so progress looks like a path instead of a flat checklist. There is also a session timeline that shows recent play sessions, challenge accuracy, and the skills involved in those sessions.

On the backend, the progression router now serves skill tree, trajectory, weekly summary, upcoming-skill, session timeline, and alert data. The mastery updater also emits breakthrough and regression events and can create alerts when a regression crosses the line from signal to intervention-worthy issue.

On the operations side, there is now an admin progression health page focused on unacknowledged alerts, and on the parent engagement side there is a weekly digest service that can send compact learning updates by email.

The main lesson is that visibility cannot be bolted on at the end. Once we started trying to explain progress to parents and teachers, we immediately needed better event types, clearer alert semantics, and more careful distinctions between a skill that is locked, one that is warming up, one that is mastered, and one that is slipping.

We also saw how important narrative framing is for adults. "Your child has 0.74 mastery" is not a parent-facing product. "Your child unlocked two new skills, had one breakthrough, and is almost ready for the next ratio concept" is much more useful. The product needs both: precise internal state and human-readable explanations layered on top.

This is not a finished reporting system. Some admin sections are still placeholders. The weekly digest does not yet compute upcoming skills for the email itself. The parent and admin experiences are useful, but they still need stronger polish around explanation, empty states, and actionability.

We also want the progression surfaces to stay grounded in actual gameplay rather than drifting into a generic dashboard product. The long-term standard is that every chart or alert should point back to a real learning moment in the game, not a detached analytics artifact.

The next step is to close the loop between progression state and content planning. We want the system to use these signals not just for reporting after the fact, but for deciding what challenge role a student should get next, what review spacing makes sense, and when adults should be nudged before a student drifts too far off track.

In practice that means better trajectory views, stronger teacher drill-down, clearer parent explanations, and more direct ties between mastery state and the actual challenges we generate.