Goodbye, Xamplr

After 9 years. I’m shutting it down.

If you’ve ever used Xamplr — the EdTech tool I built for teaching psychology — or followed its progress as a student, teacher, or curious onlooker, this post is a way of wrapping it all up. This is the story of where it came from, how it grew, why it’s going away (short version: the effort to keep it running no longer makes sense) and what I learned along the way. It’s part eulogy, part changelog, part thank-you note. Also seems to be another one of those, “I loved this thing but it’s time to move on” type of posts. Maybe that’s a theme with me?

As of today, Xamplr hosts over 82,000 examples — created by students, vetted by their peers, and attached to a whole library of vocabulary terms. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you or your students contributed a few of those examples yourself.

The Start

Xamplr was born out of a simple classroom need: I wanted my students to stop memorizing psychology definitions in isolation and start connecting them to real-world examples. At first, we did this with notecards. Later, we tried a wiki. Eventually, I built a little web app.

To make that happen, during the summer of 2016, I had to teach myself how to build it. I had a long-dormant computer science degree, which gave me a bit of a head start — but most of the tools Xamplr’s built on didn’t even exist when I graduated. So I brushed up while coding. It started as a single-page tool I made in React, using Firebase to store the examples. I set it up for students to submit their own examples, review each other’s, and earn or lose gamified points based on the approvals of their peers. There was even a leaderboard. And to my surprise — it worked pretty well when I tried it out with my own students.

I’d been dropping hints that I was working on something, and eventually I told them, “All right, we’re going to start using this thing I’ve been building.” Luckily, my classroom setup made it possible. It was a big room — filled with natural light and way too many plants — and it had both a full set of desks facing the front for direct instruction and a ring of desktop computers lining the outer walls. I could introduce a new feature at the front of the room, walk everyone through how it worked, and then say, “Alright, go try it out.” The whole class would stand up and move to the computers, and I could rotate around for one-on-one check-ins as they used this thing that I was still actively building. Some students were skeptical, sure. But a lot of them were into it right away. There was this feeling of: “Wait, Mr. Wray built this? And we’re using it?” Like they were part of something weird and new and kind of exciting.

And the best part? If something broke — or just needed tweaking — I could walk over to their machine, check it out, jot a note, and sometimes even go to my machine and fix it, right there during class. I’d write a bit of code, push an update, and yell out, “Okay, everyone refresh.” and it’d be fixed. That never got old. Felt like magic.

Going Public

In year two, I shared Xamplr with the AP Psychology Teachers Facebook group. A lot of folks on there knew me from my psych songs on YouTube, so the post got a decent response. People signed up. Teachers started using it with their classes. And I started hearing from them.

They had feedback. They had questions. They had requests. So I listened. I added a feedback form. I gave teachers the ability to build their own vocab lists, assign them to specific classes, and use common AP vocab sets straight from the College Board.

One big shift that made the site more usable was changing the way students interacted with content. Originally, each term had its own page, and examples lived beneath it like a scrolling comment feed. Eventually, I rebuilt that into a mobile-friendly card stack. Now, when students wanted to practice a vocab term they’d see ten example cards drop down from the top of the screen. Then they’d swipe each card right for a good example, left for a bad one, up if the card just restated the definition, and down to flag something inappropriate. That change made a big difference — especially on phones.

Meanwhile, the leaderboard started to feel like a real motivator. My own students competed with each other, but also with other schools (my Psych teacher friends) across the country. I remember calling out schools by name: “We’re behind Albemarle! We gotta beat Steve Turner! Let’s go.” That kind of thing gave it some fun energy.

I also had a team of student interns who played a huge role in keeping Xamplr running smoothly. Starting in 2017, and across several school years, I had anywhere from six to a dozen students each year who’d hang out of spare computers in my classroom and help with moderation, example vetting, content organization, and even a bit of coding. Most focused on reviewing submissions and keeping the content clean and useful. Their attention to detail and willingness to take it seriously made the platform far better than I could’ve managed on my own. I’m really grateful for that crew.

Making It Sustainable

Up through 2020, I paid for Xamplr out of pocket — hosting, database, domain, everything. Eventually I introduced a premium version: $39 per year, based on what other tools like Quizlet charged. I kept a free tier available too.

I did it by the book: registered a business, used Stripe for payments, filed taxes. That part was not fun. I’d formed an S-corp for it (bad idea, shoulda been an LLC), and every tax season meant hours of filling out complicated forms and usually messing up at least one of them. I got used to the angry letters and threats of penalties from the IRS. I spent hours on the phone trying to plead them away with my best charity-case teacher voice, armed with nothing but good intentions and a bootleg understanding of small business accounting.

Even so, the premium model helped. Teachers were willing to pay, especially during the early pandemic years when schools went remote and needed digital tools.

I added new assignment types: Blanksters, where students filled in the correct term based on a contextual example; and SLOs (Student Learning Outcomes), which let teachers run pre- and post-tests to measure growth.

Usage peaked in 2021 with around 300 teachers using the platform, and about 70 of them paid. I gave free premium access to some of the folks who helped me test things or provided feedback.

The Fade

By 2022, my mind had moved on to other projects. I was still maintaining Xamplr, but I wasn’t building new features. The last one I added was a way to generate slideshow presentations of example content — but very few used it.

At the same time, I was getting more serious about coding. I built another classroom tool, started applying for developer jobs, and eventually landed one. Today, I work full-time as a software developer, which means I don’t need a side project to scratch the coding itch. And I don’t really want to spend my nights moderating content such as duplicate terms or wading through the many example submissions that are basically digital graffiti.

Which became a problem — because moderation got harder.

The College Board changed its AP Psychology framework. Instead of nine manageable units, there were now five enormous ones, each with 100+ terms. Teachers uploaded huge lists of new terms, often duplicating existing content, and students submitted massive numbers of examples — many of them junk. My admin panel filled up with random keystrokes and nonsense.

It all wasn’t built to scale like that, and neither was I.

I also realized that some of the value Xamplr offered had been overtaken by better tools. With AI tools like ChatGPT, students can now generate their own examples instantly — tailored, funny, themed, whatever they want. It’s great, and people should just use that now. It majorly changes things.

Why I’m Shutting It Down

The short version is: the effort to keep it running no longer makes sense.

Between IRS paperwork, server costs, spam moderation, outdated code, new responsibilities, and better tools already out there, I just can’t justify keeping it alive. Especially in light of having a family and young kids. I turned off the paid accounts last year. And sometime this summer, I’ll shut it down completely.

No more logins. No support. No backups.

Xamplr had a good run. And if you’re reading this because you used it in a classroom at some point — thank you. Thank you for trusting it. For telling your students about it. For emailing me bug reports and suggestions and encouragement. For helping keep up a special project with me. It really meant a lot.

I made Xamplr because I needed it. It helped me teach vocab. But it also helped me get through a moment of transition — gave me a project to focus on, something to build while I was figuring out what came next. Maybe you needed it too. Maybe it helped you prep for the old AP Psych FRQs a little better, or gave your students a way to think through abstract terms in a more concrete way. And maybe now you don’t need it either — the College Board’s changes do seem to de-emphasize the kind of applied vocab thinking Xamplr supported best. Either way, it filled a need for a while. And now, maybe we don’t need it anymore. And that’s okay.

– Brad