Brainy Grid for pediatric OTs: graded pencil practice for home programs

What the child does

A graphic dictation is a grid drawing exercise: “three squares right, one diagonal up, two down.” Brainy Grid reads each step aloud; the child counts the squares and draws the line on paper. At the end of the route a picture appears — a cat, a rocket, a dinosaur. The screen gives the instruction and never shows a line to trace.

Skills the task loads

• Visual motor integration. Every step ends on a grid node. The eye picks the target, and the hand has to land the pencil on it.
• Bilateral coordination. One hand stabilizes the notebook while the other draws. Paper on a table shifts; the assisting hand has to keep it still for the whole route.
• Motor planning and sequencing. Each step is a direction plus a count, held in working memory and turned into a movement — then the next one, dozens of times per drawing.
• Visual-spatial perception and directionality. Routes use up to 8 directions: left, right, up, down and four diagonals. Left–right confusion shows up directly in the orientation score.
• Pencil grasp and grading of pressure. The app does not see either — it reads only the finished line. What it gives you is a reason to hold a real pencil on real paper for a whole drawing, which is where the grasp you are teaching gets practiced.
• Sustained attention. A drawing is done in one sitting, with no timers and no rewards between steps. Whether accuracy holds into the second half of the route is scored as persistence.

How difficulty is graded

Each of the 200+ dictations has a difficulty score computed only from the route itself: its length, the share of diagonal steps, how many of the eight directions it uses, the share of one-square steps, and whether any single step runs longer than ten squares. The score is split into 4 levels — easy, medium, hard and master — and the thresholds are fixed, so “hard” means the same route complexity from one release to the next.

A parent can set, per child, the level dictations start from. Easier routes move to the back of the queue rather than disappearing, so the child can always step back down. Square size is the other dial: a notebook with larger squares makes any route easier for a younger child or a weaker grasp.

What the report measures — and what it does not

The parent photographs the finished page. On the device, the app finds the notebook grid, follows the pencil line and compares it with the route it dictated. Each drawing gets:

• Accuracy — how closely the drawn shape matches the dictated one, 0 to 100.
• Orientation — the share of steps drawn in the right direction.
• Counting — the share of steps with the right number of squares. One slip that shifts the rest of the drawing counts once, not once per step.
• Persistence — how much of the route actually reached the paper, lowered when errors pile up in the second half.

When the photo does not allow a reliable reading, that score is left blank rather than guessed. The parent area keeps the history for each child, with the trend across drawings, so the family can show you what happened between sessions.

What it is not: a standardized or normed assessment. The scores are not comparable to the Beery VMI or any other test, the same page photographed twice can differ by a few points, and line quality, grasp and pressure are not measured. Read the trend over several drawings, not a single number.

Setting it up for a family

• The family installs Brainy Grid from the App Store or Google Play and adds the child — up to five children on one device.
• The child’s part works offline and needs no account. Photos of drawings never leave the device.
• The parent area and every purchase sit behind a parental gate.
• One dictation is free to try; the full catalog is a subscription the family buys in the store. No ads.

Dysgraphia and DCD: why paper, not a screen

For children with dysgraphia or developmental coordination disorder, the practice that carries over to the classroom is a pencil on paper. A stylus slides on glass; paper pushes back, and that friction is part of what the hand learns from.

Brainy Grid keeps the screen to the instruction. It does not teach letter formation, and it is not a treatment for dysgraphia or DCD: it is structured, graded paper-and-pencil practice a family can do between sessions, inside the plan you set.

Paper versus tablet handwriting in six-year-olds: No & Choi, 2021

Brainy Grid is an educational product, not a medical device or a diagnostic tool.

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