Your Students Are Forgetting Their Personal Bests
Here’s a scenario every PE teacher knows: a student runs a personal best in the 100m sprint, you high-five, the bell rings, and by next week the number has vanished. It was scribbled on a worksheet that went home, buried in a notes app, or simply forgotten. The achievement happened — the record of it didn’t survive.
Personal bests are one of the most powerful motivators in physical education. They turn competition with others into competition with yourself. But without a proper way to track them, students never see the line connecting their first attempt to where they are now.
That’s the problem PBHero was built to solve — and the tech decisions behind it are worth looking at for any PE teacher interested in how apps can genuinely support student growth.
What Is PBHero?
PBHero is a free personal best tracker designed for young athletes and their parents. It covers track, field, swimming, and custom events — basically any activity where a student can record a time, distance, or rep count and try to beat it.
But it’s not a spreadsheet replacement. The app is built around three design principles that make it genuinely different from simply logging numbers in a notes app:
- Self-determination theory drives every interaction
- On-device privacy means zero data ever leaves the phone
- Gamification that rewards effort and reflection, not just results
Let’s break each one down.
Self-Determination Theory: The Psychology Engine
Self-determination theory (SDT) is one of the most well-researched frameworks in motivation science. It identifies three core psychological needs: autonomy (feeling in control), competence (feeling capable), and relatedness (feeling connected).
PBHero is designed around all three:
Autonomy
Students choose which events to track, set their own goals, and decide how to reflect on each personal best. There’s no prescribed training program or coach-driven targets. The app asks “What did you do differently this time?” — not “Why didn’t you hit your target?”
Competence
This is where the “Then vs Now” feature comes in. Every event shows the student’s first-ever attempt next to their current personal best — with the actual improvement calculated in metres, seconds, or reps. When a student sees “Long Jump: 3.44m → 3.55m (+11cm)”, that’s competence made visible. The line connecting attempt one to today is the most motivating thing in the app.
Relatedness
Apple Family Sharing means parents and siblings share the experience. The monthly Coach Kit recap — written in the child’s voice — gives parents specific conversation starters about their child’s progress. That’s relatedness: the PBs become something the family talks about at dinner, not just a number on a screen.
On-Device Privacy: Why It Matters for Schools
This is the tech decision that PE teachers should pay the most attention to.
PBHero stores everything on the device. No servers, no cloud syncing, no analytics tracking, no user accounts. When a student records a voice reflection after a PB, the audio is transcribed using on-device speech recognition — it never leaves the phone.
Why does this matter?
- No parental consent headaches. Many schools require signed consent forms before students can use apps that collect data to external servers. PBHero sidesteps this entirely — there’s nothing to consent to because nothing is transmitted.
- COPPA and FERPA friendly. For US schools, apps that collect children’s data face strict compliance requirements. On-device-only apps don’t trigger these regulations in the same way.
- No data breaches possible. If there’s no server, there’s nothing to hack. Student athletic data stays on the family’s device, period.
- Works offline. No Wi-Fi at the oval? No problem. Everything functions without an internet connection.
For any PE teacher who’s been burned by the approval process of getting a new app past the school’s IT department, the on-device architecture is a genuine advantage. There’s no data processing agreement to negotiate because there’s no data processing happening externally.
Gamification That Actually Means Something
Most fitness apps gamify with badges and streaks that feel hollow after a week. PBHero takes a different approach — the gamification system is designed to visualise growth, not just reward activity.
The Hero Sigil
Every student has a personal crest — a “hero sigil” — that evolves with each personal best. One petal per PB, one shard per sport. Over time, the sigil becomes a visual fingerprint of their athletic journey. A student with 15 PBs across three sports has a visibly richer sigil than someone who started last month — and both can see exactly where they are.
The Personal Island
Each PB unlocks a new landmark on a personal island that grows over time. This is a clever way to make abstract progress tangible — kids don’t just see a number go up, they see their world get bigger.
The Rewards Shop
Parents design a custom rewards shop in the Parent Zone. Kids earn shards through PBs and redeem them for real-world rewards — ice cream, a sleepover, whatever the family decides. Parent approval is built in and biometric-confirmed (Face ID or fingerprint). This turns the app into a family system, not just a tracker.
Moments: Reflection After Every PB
After every personal best, PBHero prompts a short growth-mindset reflection. Students can answer in voice (transcribed on-device), video, photo, or text. They can attach a clip of the actual jump, race, or swim. The reflection lives with the PB permanently.
This is where SDT meets practical assessment. If you’re a PE teacher running a fitness testing unit, imagine having students not just record their numbers but also reflect on what they did differently, what they want to improve, and how they felt about the attempt. That’s assessment-quality data generated naturally through the app’s design.
How PE Teachers Can Use PBHero
While PBHero is marketed to parents, it’s built on features that PE teachers can use directly in class:
1. Fitness Testing Units
Instead of recording beep test levels, sit-and-reach distances, and push-up counts on paper, have students log them in PBHero. Next term, when you retest, the “Then vs Now” comparison does the work for you. Students see their improvement instantly — no spreadsheets required.
2. Athletics Carnivals
Students can log their results across events (long jump, shot put, sprints) and immediately see where they improved from last year’s carnival. The Hero Sigil grows in real time during the event.
3. Swimming Programs
PBHero supports individual events (50m freestyle, backstroke, etc.) and shows improvement across attempts. Perfect for school swimming carnivals or weekly swim sessions.
4. Cross Country and Run Club
Track personal bests over a cross country course or weekly run club. The 90-day improvement insights and weekly streak tracking reward students who show up consistently — not just the fastest runners.
5. Growth Mindset Conversations
The Moments feature gives you actual student reflections tied to specific performances. Use these in one-on-one conversations, parent-teacher meetings, or as evidence in portfolio-based assessment.
The Tech Stack at a Glance
| Feature | How It Works |
|---|---|
| Data storage | 100% on-device (no cloud, no servers) |
| Voice transcription | On-device speech recognition (Apple Speech framework) |
| Family sharing | Apple Family Sharing — one subscription, all kids |
| Parental controls | Biometric-confirmed (Face ID / Touch ID) Parent Zone |
| Events | Track, field, swimming + unlimited custom events |
| Analytics | 90-day improvement trends, weekly streaks, monthly Coach Kit recaps |
| Pricing | Free for one child. PBHero Family unlocks more profiles, rewards and charts (7-day free trial) |
| Platform | iOS (App Store) |
Why This Matters for PE
The PE technology space is full of apps that digitise things teachers already do — timers, stopwatches, exercise databases. PBHero is doing something rarer: it’s using technology to create a psychological experience that’s impossible with paper and pencil.
You can’t create a growing sigil on a clipboard. You can’t attach a video reflection to a handwritten beep test score. You can’t show a “Then vs Now” comparison across three years of fitness testing on a worksheet.
The combination of self-determination theory, on-device privacy, and meaningful gamification makes PBHero one of the most thoughtfully designed PE-adjacent apps released this year. Whether you use it in the classroom or recommend it to parents, it’s worth a look.
Download PBHero free on the App Store →
Want to explore more apps for PE? Check out the full tools library at connectedpe.com/tools.