We’re excited to introduce Skill Builders alongside the launch of Scriblit (formerly Short Answer).
Skill Builders are quick practice activities that help students master the specific writing skills they need most. We’re launching with a library of 150+ 2nd-12th grade, Common Core Language Standards-aligned activities and skills.
Skill Builders have been in development for over a year and are a direct result of iterative beta testing with roughly 40 educators across the country over the course of the 2026 school year. They represent a major step forward in our mission to help every student write better, together.
In this post, we’d like to share how they work and how and why we built them.
What are Skill Builders?
Skill Builders help students practice the writing skills they need most in the context of what they’re already learning.
After any Scriblit writing activity, AI analyzes student work and identifies common writing skill gaps across the class. Teachers can then generate a Skill Builder in seconds. Simply choose the skill to practice, enter the content you’re teaching—a novel, historical event, science topic, or anything else—and Scriblit creates a collaborative practice activity tailored to your classroom.
Students log in with a join code and complete each skill builder asynchronously. They receive immediate feedback on submissions, earn rewards and hot streaks for correct responses, and can cheer on their teammates towards a shared class goal. You can monitor individual and class progress in real time and through class-level reports.
Rather than treating writing instruction and content instruction as separate tasks, Skill Builders bring them together to help you create cohesive writing instruction across content areas. And because they’re automatically generated and scored, you can focus less on prep and grading and more on teaching.
Why did we build Skill Builders?
In conversations with educators over the last three years, it became clear that Scriblit (formerly Short Answer) was a great writing and formative assessment practice tool, but it needed to do more to help directly teach students how to write. So, put simply: We built it because you requested it.
We were confident in doing so because it aligns with best practices in writing instruction.
Much of Scriblit’s theory for improving learning outcomes for students (we’ll share much more on this when we share our updated Theory of Change soon) grows out of a research base in “writing to learn.” This research suggests that having students write to process new material and think through problems reliably improves their understanding of content across the curricula (a .30 effect size !!).
This is a great thing, and yet 18 percent of writing-to-learn studies have still shown negative effects on learning. Some literacy experts believe this may be due to asking students to write when they don’t actually have the requisite skills; students may not know how to structure words into sentences into paragraphs. As a result, simply “writing more” may lead to overwhelmed working memory and difficulty processing content. As one writing expert suggests, writing to learn has incredible potential to improve outcomes, “but only if the heavy cognitive load it imposes is modulated.” We can achieve that modulation by explicitly teaching students how to craft words into sentences into paragraphs into essays. Skill Builders are our attempt to do just that.
So it’s not just about more writing practice; it’s about more of the right kind of writing practice.
In particular, we believe Skill Builders are pedagogically strong because:
- They’re generated based on your content, so they can be grounded in any subject.
- Skill suggestions grow directly out of authentic writing tasks taking place across the curriculum, creating a unique opportunity for cohesion in writing instruction by combining daily formative assessment with explicit writing instruction.
- They’re scored using AI, so in many activities, students write their own unique sentences rather than having to use selected-response-based tasks.
- They’re automatically generated and scored, so they place a very low burden on teachers, which we believe makes it easier for busy teachers to embed more writing instruction and practice in their classrooms.
- It is living, breathing, and social in ways that are more engaging for students when compared to worksheets or multiple-choice-based tasks.
- They open more opportunities for typing practice.
How does AI support Skill Builders?
AI plays a supporting role throughout Skill Builders, helping you save time while keeping instructional decisions in your hands. AI helps:
- Identify common writing skill gaps after classroom writing activities
- Generate practice activities grounded in the content you’re already teaching
- Provide immediate feedback during practice
- Track mastery over time and recommend future skills
You remain in control of what students practice, when they practice, and how instruction is delivered. Students never interact with AI through an open-ended chatbot interaction; all writing is done entirely by students.
Wait, this uses AI. Is it safe?
Yes.
We’ve designed Skill Builders with the same privacy and safety principles that guide every Scriblit activity.
Among other protections:
- Personally identifiable information is never shared with AI.
- Scriblit uses Amazon Bedrock to provide additional data security and AI guardrails.
- Student data is never used to train or fine-tune AI models.
- Students never interact with AI through a conversational interface.
- Students join activities using one-time class codes rather than personal accounts.
- Students can flag AI feedback for teacher review at any time.
- Teachers remain the final authority over instructional materials and student learning.
Looking ahead
This is just the beginning. Over the coming months, we’ll continue expanding our library of skills and refining them alongside educators.
We can’t wait to hear what you and your students think.
