Platform
Assigning work
Courses, lessons and missions; how to set an assignment with a deadline; drafts; and why a course you made yourself is not in the catalog.
Your class can already open every published course and fly every mission in it. Assigning work does not unlock anything. It does three other things, and they are the reason to bother:
- it puts the work on your students’ dashboards with a deadline;
- it decides how many tries they get;
- it is what every panel on your dashboard is counted against.
Without an assignment, your dashboard has nothing to measure. “Who has not started?” is meaningless until there is a this to have not started.
Course, lesson, mission
Three sizes of thing, nested.
Setting an assignment
Where work is set: the class, the Assignments tab, and the form.
Class → Assignments → New Assignment.
Pick a course
Every course you can assign is in the list, including ones you wrote yourself.
Pick a lesson, or leave it on “Entire course”
A second dropdown appears once you have chosen a course.
Entire course sets everything in it. Good for “here is the next fortnight”.
One lesson sets just that lesson. Good for “this is tonight’s homework”. This is the more common choice and the one that makes your dashboard readable — a panel that says “3 of 12 need attention” is much more use when the assignment is one lesson than when it is a whole term.
Give it a title, if the default is not clear enough
Optional. Left blank, the assignment is named after the course and lesson. Fill it in when your class thinks of it by another name — “Week 3 Lab”.
Set a due date
Optional, and it is the single most useful field on this form.
A due date does not lock anything. Students can still work after it, and their submissions are simply marked LATE. What it changes is your side: without a due date, three of the nine dashboard panels have nothing to measure against. “Not started, due in 2 days” cannot fire; the completion trend has no marker to run towards. Set one even if you are relaxed about it.
Decide how many tries they get
Max Submissions, 5 by default.
When a student has used them all and still has not passed, their next attempt is refused with “Submission limit reached”. They cannot get past it on their own — you have to give them more (see Giving a student more attempts).
Five is a reasonable default for a mission you expect them to get right. Raise it for something exploratory. This is also what the dashboard’s “at cap, still failing” flag keys off, which is one of the most useful things it tells you.
Publish it, or leave it as a draft
The Published tick is on by default, and the form tells you which one you have chosen:
Published — “Students will see this assignment immediately.” Draft — “Save as draft — students won’t see it until you publish.”
A draft is invisible to students, and it is invisible to your dashboard too: nobody is ever flagged as “not started” on work they have not been given.
Once created, an assignment shows a status chip you can read at a glance — “9d remaining”, “Due today”, “2d overdue” — with the assigned date and the submission limit underneath.
Editing and deleting
The pencil on an assignment row edits its title, due date, submission limit and published state. Two things this is good for:
- Extending a deadline for the whole class in one move, when it turns out to be harder than you thought.
- Raising the submission limit for everybody, when half the class is stuck at the cap. Faster than granting attempts one student at a time.
Deleting asks first, and tells you exactly what it does:
Student attempts will be preserved but unlinked from this assignment.
Which means: nobody loses their work, but the assignment vanishes from the dashboard along with its statistics, and the exported CSV — which is built from assignments — will no longer contain those rows. Export before you delete.
What your students see
An assignment appears in two places for them.
Two behaviours worth knowing before a student asks you about them:
- Lessons can be locked until the one before is finished. A student who skips ahead sees “Complete the previous lesson to unlock.” They are not broken; they are being sequenced.
- A newly published assignment can take up to a minute to appear on a student’s course page — the list is briefly cached. If you publish something mid-lesson and a child says they cannot see it, have them wait a moment and reload before you go looking for a fault.
Writing your own courses
The Content tab in the menu bar is a course editor. You can write lessons, add missions, and translate them.
One thing catches every teacher out, so it is worth saying plainly:
If you do not want to wait — and for most classroom material you should not — set the course’s visibility to class-only. Class-only content skips the public catalog and skips review entirely. Your class sees it because they are your class; nobody else sees it at all. That is the right setting for a worksheet you wrote for Year 9 on Tuesday.
Courses also carry a small pill showing where they came from: Official for UAVProg’s own, Community for one a teacher wrote, with the author’s name underneath. Your students see it too.
A useful habit
The dashboard reads best when an assignment is one lesson with a due date about a week out. Set the next one before the current one is due, and your class always has exactly one live piece of work — which is also exactly what the “Needs attention” and “Not started” panels are built to report on.
Next
→ Reading your dashboard — now that there is work to measure, here is what the nine panels are telling you.