Applied psychometrics · Solo build · 2026
Spannum
A working-memory test and trainer that turns the digit-span protocol into a consumer web app, with age norms and a shareable report.
Problem
The digit-span task is a well-validated measure of working memory, but it lives in research papers and clinical settings. The consumer apps that borrow its name mostly drop the protocol and promise to make you smarter.
Approach
I built the test to the published protocol, forward and backward, digits and letters, with stimuli spoken by the browser's built-in speech synthesis rather than pre-recorded audio. Results are scored against age norms from the literature, and the site is explicit about what the evidence supports: training improves the task, not general intelligence. The public site is prerendered so crawlers and answer engines see the real content; the app itself is an installable PWA on a separate domain.
Result
Live and open to the public at spannum.com, with a shareable report, comparison against age norms, and the peer-reviewed sources cited on the site.