Performance Chef Academy: a LearnWorlds academy built end to end

Performance Chef Academy teaches chefs what food does inside an athlete's body and how that changes what goes on the plate. Dr Nessan Costello, a sport nutritionist with over a decade in elite football, had the 12 modules written. I built the platform, learning experience and launch infrastructure that turned that content into a paid programme.

A course for working chefs, built to the standard elite sport expects. It had to work on a phone between services, assess judgement rather than reward guessing, and be ready for a fixed public launch date with payments, instalments, legal terms and completion records in place.

I was the sole builder, from an empty LearnWorlds account to live cohorts. My work covered the website, platform setup, learning design, interaction engineering, assessment system, transactional emails and launch configuration. Dr Costello wrote the learning content. I designed and built how a chef would experience it.

A chef opens a mission and sees where they are in the module, the words it will use, and why it matters in their kitchen. Each Core Knowledge block starts with a kitchen scenario, not a definition.

Then the mission stops them. 3 times per mission they have to make a call before the page lets them continue:

Decision Interruption: a judgement in the middle of the reading.

Service Scenario: a service problem. Where the moment is genuinely time pressured, it runs against a 30 second clock.

Chef's Call: what they would actually do.

4 short recaps appear as they scroll. The standard mission carries 240 XP, with sound on completion and a bigger finish at the end of a module. Module 1 uses the earlier 190 XP standard. The game layer rewards progress without slowing the learner down.

The diagrams are drawn in code, including fuel mix crossover, fat oxidation curves, energy system timelines, gut transit chains and caffeine clearance. They stay sharp on different screens and follow the PCA brand.

LearnWorlds runs embedded content in a sandboxed frame with restrictions on scroll behaviour, and iOS Chrome caused problems with 3D card flips. I built around those constraints with manual scroll calculations, crossfades instead of flips, and tap and hover detection based on input capability rather than screen width.

Each of the 12 modules ends with a graded assessment: 20 questions drawn at random from a bank of 45, with 80% required to move on. That is 540 bank questions in total, alongside the mission knowledge checks.

During review, Dr Costello showed that a quiz could be passed by picking the longest answer. I set a rule for the whole programme: the correct answer must never be the uniquely longest option, all 4 options must sit within 25% of each other in length, and answer keys must be distributed across A to D without repeating a letter within a mission. I applied assertion checks and verified each key from the answer text, JavaScript comparison and button index.

In the Module 8 decisions, the correct option had been the longest in 18 of 18 cases. I rebalanced the keys from A 0, B 9, C 8, D 1 to A 4, B 4, C 5, D 5, with every option set within the length standard.

I also audited all 540 bank questions. 10 had a second defensible answer and 1 had a garbled option. Every fix went to Dr Costello for sign off before I applied it across the cohort and self-paced copies. I verified the saved assessments after the changes.

12 modules became 4 Parts of 3 modules, plus a separate Certificate of Completion course, sold as 1 programme. Parts release monthly by date and open in order through prerequisites. Learners can pay in full or in 4 monthly instalments through Stripe.

The PCA team issued an 83 line launch checklist. I built to it and returned a companion document separating what was done, what was done differently and why, and what needed their decision.

LearnWorlds had no terms checkbox at checkout, so I added a required billing field that blocks purchase until the buyer accepts the Terms of Purchase and Refund Policy and requests immediate access. The acceptance prints on the invoice.

I set up the legal pages using the PCA team's documents and connected them to the footer and checkout.

I rewrote the cookie policy from the platform placeholder and held the marketing pixel behind consent.

I wrote search titles and descriptions for 8 pages and excluded 11 gated and system pages from the sitemap.

I rewrote the platform's interface text into UK English and the PCA voice, including messages shown when content is still locked.

I rebuilt 18 of the automatic emails LearnWorlds sends, from purchase and instalment notices to password resets, account security and completion, using 1 dark branded template.

LearnWorlds strips stylesheets from emails, so every line is styled inline and each layout stacks on a phone without media queries. I checked the markup, wording, colour and merge tokens before handover, with test sends to verify the final messages.

I also corrected platform defaults, including a purchase email that left out release dates, a broken sign up sentence, a stray character above the logo and notification emails sharing a subject line. I switched on the completion email so learners finishing a Part are told what comes next.

I built the newsletter hub and article pages using the platform's native blog elements so the content can be found in search, with the signup form connected to the email platform. Dr Costello writes the newsletter. I built the place it lives.

I build in code and validate before handover. Every mission passed checks for JavaScript syntax, XP arithmetic, leftover placeholders, duplicate IDs, diagram markup and wording the programme is not permitted to use. The PCA team saw progress screenshots as the work happened.

The image below shows a fresh validation run on the supplied Module 4 mission file. It records the actual output rather than a simulated terminal.

The programme launched on 24 September 2026.

Cohort 1 is running, and Cohort 2 is enrolling.

The website, learning structure, interactive missions, assessments, payments and school emails work together as 1 LearnWorlds academy.

Live site: https://www.performancechefacademy.com

Dr Nessan Costello, Co-founder, Performance Chef Academy