Functional Activity Grader
Making a task harder or easier is not one dial — it is a dozen independent ones, and each moves without the others. This writes the lattice down so a variation can be found deliberately rather than remembered.
The activity
Whatever you are working on. The dimensions below describe how it is being done right now.
How it is set up now
One step in either direction
Each option moves a single dimension. That is deliberate: a variation that moves two at once has a difficulty nobody can attribute afterwards, which defeats the point of grading in steps. Click one to apply it.
A written progression
For a note or a handout
Why one dimension at a time
An activity made harder in two ways at once produces a result nobody can interpret. If someone struggles with standing on foam with their eyes closed, the useful question is which of those two things was the problem — and having changed both, there is no way to know.
Moving one dimension per step keeps every change attributable. It is slower, and it is the difference between a progression you can reason about and a sequence of increasingly difficult tasks.
The dimensions are not comparable to each other
The overall figure here is called a position rather than a score, and the distinction is not pedantry.
Moving from firm ground to foam and moving from eyes open to eyes closed are both one step. They are not the same size of step, they are not the same size of step for different people, and neither is the gap between “occasional cues” and “no cues”. The steps within a dimension are ordered but not evenly spaced, and the dimensions are not on a common scale at all.
So the number is useful for one thing: comparing two setups of the same activity against each other, to see roughly which is more demanding. It is not a difficulty rating, it does not compare across activities, and it means nothing about a person.
Grading down is not failure
The easier column is not a fallback. Finding the step at which something can be done well is usually more informative than finding the step at which it cannot, and a task that is achievable with an obvious next step above it is a better place to work than one that is a struggle throughout.