Getting to Know Instructor Studio

A guided tour of every tool in the Instructor Studio, with a small thing to try at each stop.

This is the tutorial to read first. Unlike the lesson-building tutorials, it does not build one lesson from end to end — it walks the Studio feature by feature, in the order you meet them, so that when you sit down to build something real you already know what is available and what each control is for. Each section is short and self-contained. You can read it straight through in about an hour, or come back to one section when you need it.

You need nothing but an instructor account. Make yourself a throwaway lesson called Scratch and try things in it; nothing here reaches a student unless you publish and assign it, which is the last thing we do.

Contents

  1. Before you start
  2. A lesson and its parts
  3. Organizing panels
  4. Writing a panel
  5. Making a panel look right
  6. Finding and tidying text
  7. Building a glossary
  8. Working with ĀYŌDÈ Intelligence
  9. Asking questions
  10. A challenge students program
  11. Testing it yourself
  12. Publishing and assigning

Then: Where to go next.

1. Before you start

Signing in

Open the Studio and sign in with your instructor account using the identity control in the top-right corner. Click it again at any time to see who you are signed in as, or to switch between accounts you use — if you teach under more than one, the quick-switch saves you signing in again each time.

Your three spaces

The first time you use the Studio it asks you to choose your spaces. A space is simply a place your work is kept. There are three, and they do different jobs:

Space What it is for
Authoring Space Where your drafts live while you write them
Publishing Space Where finished lessons go so students can reach them
Reference Library Where you keep material you want to look things up in — and what the AI features read when they need to know your subject

Set all three. For most people the Authoring and Publishing spaces are the place their course lives. You can change them later from File ▸ Reference Library & Spaces….

The Studio insists on a Reference Library before it will let you get to work. That is deliberate: several features are only as good as the material you give them to read.

Development or Production

Next to the identity control is a selector reading Development or Production. This chooses which world your work lands in. Production is the real one — the lessons your students actually see. Development is for practice and trying things out.

Switching between them clears what you had open, on purpose: a draft written against one is not carried into the other, and nothing you saved in Development can leak into a real course. If you are following this tour on a scratch lesson, Development is the right place to be.

The version badge

Bottom-right, in small type, is a badge reading something like build 213 · 20260910T123348. It tells you which version of the Studio you are running. Click it and it copies a diagnostic log to your clipboard — if you ever report a problem, paste that in. It is the single most useful thing you can attach to a bug report.

Instructor View and Student View

Two buttons in the menu bar switch between them. Instructor View is where you work. Student View shows the same lesson as a student receives it — the editing tools disappear, questions present their answer boxes, and multiple-choice questions deal an actual set of choices. Use it constantly. It is much easier to notice that a question is confusing when you are looking at it the way it will be met.

2. A lesson and its parts

A lesson is a small tree of panels. A panel is one screenful of material with a name. Panels can nest, up to five levels deep, which is how you group related material.

There are four kinds of tab in the panel list, and each carries a label so you can always tell what you are looking at:

Label What it is
Content Teaching material — text, pictures, diagrams, examples
Mission A group of questions, with a short introduction
Challenge One question, which is graded
File Something bundled behind the scenes — a starter file, data

The first three are all Panels: the student sees them, or attempts them. A File deliberately is not — it is used behind the scenes and never shown to the student directly. Keeping that distinction in mind saves confusion later, when you are looking at a lesson and wondering what a student will actually meet.

Opening, saving, naming

Menu What it does
File ▸ New… Start an empty lesson
File ▸ Open… Browse for a saved lesson
File ▸ Save Save where it already lives
File ▸ Save as… Choose a folder and a name — including New folder… to make one as you go

Name the lesson early. The name becomes its identity everywhere else, so setting it before you write saves renaming later.

Save often. The Studio will not let you publish a lesson with unsaved changes, and that is a feature rather than an obstruction: what a student receives is always exactly what you last reviewed.

Try it: File ▸ New…, then File ▸ Save as…, and name it Scratch.

3. Organizing panels

The panel list runs down the left. Each row shows a number (2.1 — its position in the lesson), the panel’s name, and its kind label.

To do this Do that
Add a panel The + Panel button below the list — choose New Content or New Mission
Add a question Right-click a panel and choose New challenge (available under a Mission)
Rename Double-click the row
Reorder Drag it by the ☰ handle
Nest, or un-nest The ‹ and › arrows on the row
Delete The bin icon on the row

The arrows hide themselves when they would not make sense — you will not see ‹ on a top-level panel, or › on a first child — so you cannot accidentally strand a panel somewhere odd.

You can drag the divider between the panel list and the editor to give yourself more room for either. The Studio remembers the width. The ‹‹ control collapses the list entirely when you want the whole window for writing.

Try it: add three content panels, rename them, drag them into a different order, then nest the third under the second.

4. Writing a panel

The editing area is split: you type on the left and the finished page appears on the right as you type.

You are writing in a lightly marked-up text format. # starts a heading, **bold** is bold, a blank line starts a new paragraph. But you rarely need to remember any of that, because right-clicking the text gives you a menu for everything. That menu is the Studio’s real control panel, and most of this tour is a walk through it.

Text ▸ Format

Select some words and pick one:

Bold · Italic · Inline code · Strikethrough · Math · Superscript · Subscript · Highlight · Link…

A tick appears beside any style already applied to your selection, and a half square when your selection is partly styled. Choosing a ticked style again removes it. Link… asks for the address; removing a link keeps the words.

Text ▸ Block

These change the whole line or paragraph your cursor sits in, rather than a selection: Paragraph, Heading 1, 2, 3, Bulleted list, Numbered list, Blockquote, Code block, Display math and Display math (numbered).

Numbered display maths is worth knowing about if you teach anything with equations: it asks for a label, numbers the equation on the page, and lets you refer to it in your text. If you insert another numbered equation above it later, everything renumbers and your references follow.

Undo

Ctrl/Cmd+Z, as you would expect — and the thing to know is that every menu command is one undo step. Applying a call out, tidying whitespace, accepting an AI suggestion, replacing every match of a search: each is one press of undo to reverse, not dozens. Typing is grouped into sensible chunks too, so undo walks back through your writing in phrases rather than letters.

Undo history is per panel and starts fresh when you switch panels.

Try it: write a heading and two paragraphs. Bold something. Make a bulleted list. Undo it all, then redo it.

5. Making a panel look right

Highlight

Under Text ▸ Format ▸ Highlight are five colours: Yellow, Cyan, Green, Pink, Orange. Select words and pick one. Put your cursor inside an existing highlight and the menu ticks its colour — choose that colour to remove it, or a different one to change it.

Use them sparingly and consistently. Five colours are enough to mean five things in your course; they are not enough to mean nothing.

Call outs

Right-click and open Call outs. Five kinds, each with its own colour and icon:

Call out Use it for
🤿 Deep Dive Material beyond what you are asking of everyone
📌 Fact Box Something to remember exactly as stated
⚠️ Warning A common mistake, before they make it
🚨 Danger Something that will really go wrong
🔍 Observe and Ponder A question to sit with, not answer yet

Select a paragraph and choose one to wrap it, or choose one with nothing selected to get a sample block to fill in. As with highlights, the menu ticks the kind your cursor is inside: pick it again to unwrap, pick another to change it.

You will notice the whole Call outs menu greys out when your cursor is inside a plain box (below). That is on purpose — it stops the Studio from silently rewriting a box you built by hand.

Boxes

Under Text ▸ Insert ▸ Box are four plainer containers: Note, Warning, Exercise and Dropdown. A Dropdown asks for a title and renders folded up, so the reader chooses to open it — good for a hint, or an answer you do not want spoiled.

Boxes are unstyled where call outs are branded. Both are useful; call outs carry your course’s visual language, boxes just hold something apart.

Pictures, figures, tables and rules

Also under Text ▸ Insert:

Item Notes
Table Drops in a small table to edit
Horizontal rule A dividing line
Image ▸ URL… Asks for the address, alt text, size, scale and alignment
Figure ▸ URL… The same, plus a caption and a label

Always write the alt text. It is what a student using a screen reader receives instead of the picture.

Use a Figure rather than an Image when you want to refer to the picture in your writing. Figures number themselves — “Figure 1.”, “Figure 2.” — and your references to them follow along when you add another one earlier.

Image ▸ Upload… is not built yet. Choosing it tells you so. For now, put your picture somewhere with an address and use URL….

Try it: add a Deep Dive call out, a Dropdown containing a hint, and a figure with a caption. Switch to Student View and see what a student gets.

6. Finding and tidying text

Find and Replace

Ctrl/Cmd+F opens a small bar at the top-right of your text.

The second row replaces. Replace changes the current match and moves on. Replace All changes every match — as a single undo step, so one Ctrl/Cmd+Z puts the whole document back exactly as it was. If a replacement would change nothing, the Studio tells you “no changes” rather than pretending to have done something.

The marks you did not type

You will notice faint marks in your text: small ␠ and ⏎ symbols on a light purple background, and sometimes a patch of coral or yellow.

These are the Studio showing you what tidying would change, before you ask it to:

Mark Meaning
Purple ␠ or ⏎ Whitespace or a line break that would be removed — a trailing space, a doubled space, an extra blank line
A deeper purple ␠␠⏎ A deliberate line break you made by ending a line with two spaces. Tidying keeps these — the different shade is asking you to confirm you meant it
Coral Raw HTML that tidying would remove
Yellow An HTML tag you opened and never closed. Tidying will not touch it until you close or delete it

Ordinary spaces between words are never marked. Neither is the single blank line between paragraphs, nor anything inside code, maths or a link. If you see a mark, there is something there worth a glance.

Tidying

Right-click ▸ Remove redundant whitespace cleans up the selection, or the whole panel if nothing is selected. Running it twice does nothing the second time.

One thing to know, because it surprises people: despite the name, this does three jobs, and the Studio does all three for you every time you save or publish, whether or not you ever choose the menu item:

  1. It removes stray whitespace — trailing spaces, doubled spaces, extra blank lines — while keeping the deliberate line breaks described above.
  2. It joins paragraphs you typed across several lines into one line. The page looks identical either way; the stored text changes.
  3. It strips raw HTML out of your writing, keeping the readable words inside the tags.

So if you paste something in from a web page or a word processor and it arrives full of hidden markup, saving cleans it up. And if you carefully hand-wrapped your paragraphs at 70 characters, saving will unwrap them, and the page will look exactly the same. Neither is a bug.

Right-click ▸ Clear formatting strips styling from a selection — bold, italic, code, strikethrough, maths, links and highlights, all in one go. Superscript and subscript survive it; that is a known gap rather than a subtlety.

Try it: paste a paragraph from a web page. Watch the coral marks appear. Tidy it, and watch them go.

7. Building a glossary

Your lesson can carry its own glossary, and terms link themselves.

  1. Select a word or phrase in your text.
  2. Right-click ▸ Glossary ▸ Add term to glossary…
  3. Write a definition and confirm.

The first term you define creates a Glossary panel for you. Every definition after that joins it, alphabetically.

Now the useful part: every mention of that term, in every panel of the lesson, becomes a link to its definition. The student clicks a term, lands on the glossary entry, and a back to reading control returns them to exactly where they were — the same panel, the same scroll position. That matters more than it sounds. A student who loses their place stops reading.

If you add terms after writing your panels, Glossary ▸ Link glossary terms goes back over everything and links what it finds. It runs automatically when you leave a panel and before every save, so in practice you rarely need it by hand.

You can edit the Glossary panel directly like any other panel — it is just a list of terms and definitions.

Try it: define two terms. Then write a sentence using one of them somewhere else and watch it become a link. Follow it, then use back to reading.

8. Working with ĀYŌDÈ Intelligence

The Studio can help you write. Everything here is a suggestion you accept or reject — nothing changes your lesson without you agreeing to it.

Working on a passage

Select some text and right-click ▸ ĀYŌDÈ Intelligence. Twenty-five operations, in five groups:

Content — Simplify · Make More Concise · Explain More · Increase Technical Depth · Add Example · Add Analogy Change what the passage covers or how deeply.

Clarity — Improve Grammar · Improve Flow · Clarify Terminology · Improve Accessibility Keep the substance, improve the writing. Improve Accessibility is worth a habit: it rewrites toward plainer, more reachable language.

Pedagogy — Adapt for Younger Students · Adapt for Older Students · Increase Student Engagement · Socratic Style Change the teaching approach. Socratic Style turns telling into asking.

Style — More Formal · More Neutral · More Conversational · More Enthusiastic Change the voice.

Generate — Summary · Key Takeaways · Learning Objectives · Practice Questions · Challenge Questions · Add term to glossary… Produce something new from the passage.

Custom… — describe what you want in your own words.

Whatever you choose, the result arrives side by side with your original, and you decide:

Choice Effect
Copy Take it to your clipboard, change nothing
Replace Use it instead of your passage
Insert Before / Insert After Keep your passage and add this too

The Generate operations lean toward inserting rather than replacing, because they add rather than revise.

Every one of these reads your whole lesson, not just the words you selected — so Simplify simplifies toward the reading level of the lesson it lives in, and Clarify Terminology uses the vocabulary you have already established, including your glossary.

Some operations also read your Reference Library, and take longer for it — they are doing research first. Explain More, Increase Technical Depth, Add Example, Add Analogy, Learning Objectives, Practice Questions and Challenge Questions all work this way. Fill your library with your real course material and they get markedly better.

Working on the whole lesson

The Lesson menu generates a whole panel from the entire lesson:

Item Produces
Generate summary panel A Summary panel, placed last
Generate learning objectives panel A Learning Objectives panel, placed first
Generate key takeaways panel A Key Takeaways panel, placed first

Once one exists the menu says Update instead. Updating rewrites that panel’s content and leaves it exactly where it sits — it never moves or re-nests it. And a re-run never reads the previously generated panels back in, so your summary does not slowly become a summary of itself.

These write straight into their panel with no side-by-side comparison, because there is nothing of yours to compare against.

Generating questions

Right-click ▸ ĀYŌDÈ Intelligence ▸ Generate assessment panel offers three kinds: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice (single), Multiple choice (multiple).

Unlike everything else in this menu, this works with nothing selected — no selection means “use this whole panel”. Select a passage to narrow it.

You get a set of proposed questions to review one at a time, accepting or discarding each. Only then do the accepted ones become real questions in your lesson, grouped under a mission. If you run it again later the Studio matches the new proposals against what is already there and shows you what is new, kept or gone, so a second run is a revision rather than a duplicate.

Filling your Reference Library

Library ▸ Upload resource… takes a file. Library ▸ Upload resource from URL… takes a web address and fetches it for you.

Either way the Studio waits until the material is genuinely searchable before it reports success — so when it says done, the AI features can actually use it. Uploading a textbook chapter, your syllabus, or your own previous lessons is the single highest-value thing you can do to improve what these features produce.

Try it: write a rough paragraph deliberately badly. Run Improve Flow, then Improve Accessibility, and read the difference. Then generate a summary panel for your scratch lesson.

9. Asking questions

Missions and challenges

A challenge is one graded question. A mission is a group of them with an introduction. Questions always live in a mission, so:

  1. Add a Mission panel from + Panel ▸ New Mission, and name it.
  2. Click it to select it.
  3. Right-click the panel list and choose New challenge.

The new challenge is added inside the selected mission. If New challenge is greyed out, the panel you have selected is not a mission and is not inside one — select the mission and try again.

A new challenge names itself after the panel before it — Trial Division - Challenge 1 — so you start with something meaningful and unique rather than “Untitled”. Keep names distinct: the Studio warns you about duplicates and will not publish until they are fixed.

How it gets graded

A challenge panel has the question on one side and, above it, an Options pane. The first choice is Grading approach:

Approach Means
Answer-based The student types or picks an answer
Program · orchestrated The student writes a program. See section 10

For answer-based questions, Grading offers three:

Grading What happens
Deterministic Their answer is compared against your answer key
AI · instant A model grades against your rubric while they wait
AI · deferred A model grades against your rubric afterwards

Choose Deterministic whenever the answer is genuinely checkable. Choose an AI strategy when you are asking for reasoning or prose that no answer key could capture — and expect to write a good rubric, because that is what the grading is.

Deterministic questions

Question type offers four:

Type For
Short answer / fill-in-the-blank A word, number or short phrase
Multiple choice — one correct Exactly one right answer
Multiple choice — multiple correct Several right answers
Math expression (symbolic) An expression judged mathematically, so 2x and x·2 both pass

Two Modifiers, both on by default: Ignore case and Ignore extra whitespace. Leave them on unless capitalisation or spacing is the thing you are testing. (They are meaningless for symbolic maths, and the pane says so rather than showing dead controls.)

Your answer key can hold several accepted answers — add every phrasing you would accept in person. Each one is written in the same marked-up text as the rest of the lesson, so an answer can contain maths or code. Answers show as finished text at rest; click one to edit it.

Multiple choice, properly

For the two multiple-choice types you do not write an answer key. You write a pool of choices and mark which are correct. Then you decide how much of that pool each student sees:

Setting Effect
Present count Show m of your n choices. Leave it empty to show all
Always include accepted Every student’s set includes the correct answers
Shuffle Vary the order

So a pool of one correct answer and seven plausible wrong ones, presenting four, gives each student the correct answer and three of your seven distractors, in a random order. The Studio describes what it will do in words — “every deal: 1 correct + 3 of 7 distractors · order shuffled” — and Re-deal rolls it again so you can watch. Write more distractors than you show; that is where the value is.

AI-graded questions

Choosing an AI strategy replaces the answer key with a Grading rubric. Each row is a criterion: a name, a maximum score, and grading guidance — the instructions the model applies. The Studio totals the criteria for you, so a rubric that no longer adds up to your maximum score is visible while you are writing it.

Write the guidance as you would write it for a teaching assistant. “Mentions the square root bound” grades reliably; “good understanding” does not.

You also set Max score, and a Locale.

One promise worth knowing

The Options pane says it plainly:

Saving creates a new challenge-variant version; earlier versions are kept and superseded, never edited in place.

In plain terms: a question a student has already answered is never rewritten underneath them. Editing a challenge makes a new version for future attempts, and what was already submitted stays judged against what was actually asked. You can revise a live lesson without corrupting work already done.

Try it: make a mission with three challenges — one short answer with several accepted phrasings, one multiple choice with a pool of eight presenting four, and one AI-graded with a two-criterion rubric. Look at all three in Student View.

10. A challenge students program

This is the most involved thing the Studio does, and the most rewarding: a question where each student gets different data, writes a real program, and is graded on what it outputs.

How it works

  1. You write a generator — a small script that invents the data.
  2. When a student attempts the question, the generator runs and writes two files: input, which their program reads, and expected, the answer key for that student’s data.
  3. Their program is compiled and run against input.
  4. Their output is compared against expected, line by line.

Because the generator runs per attempt, there is no single right answer to pass around. Two students at the same desk get different numbers.

Choose Grading approach ▸ Program · orchestrated to switch a challenge into this mode.

The generator

You get a working script to start from — it generates twenty random numbers and their primality verdicts — with one rule you must keep:

It must write two files into the current directory: ./input and ./expected.

Everything else is yours. It runs with no arguments and no input. The Studio checks that your script mentions both files and warns you if it does not, and run.sh is the entry point and cannot be renamed.

Write the generator and the answer key together, in the same script — that is the point of the design. The script that invents the numbers is the script that knows the answers, so they cannot disagree.

The language and the file

Choose Options
Language C++ (g++, C++17) · Python 3
Submission file The file the student writes — main.cpp, primes.py, whatever you name it

The file name follows the language automatically unless you have renamed it. The Studio checks the extension matches the language.

How the output is compared

Comparison Use for
Boolean per line true/false, 1/0, yes/no
String per line Exact text
Integer per line Whole numbers
Numeric per line Numbers, to a number of significant figures you choose

Numeric comparison needs between 1 and 15 significant figures — this is how you accept a floating-point answer without demanding bit-for-bit equality.

Scoring: the attempt passes only if every line matches, and the score awarded is the fraction of lines that matched. So a student whose program handles ordinary cases but not the edge case you planted gets most of the marks and a precise signal about what went wrong. Choose your awkward cases on purpose.

Your output contract has to be unambiguous. State exactly what you want — one word per line, lower case, nothing else — in the question itself. A student cannot guess whether you wanted True or true.

Writing your own comparator

If line-by-line comparison genuinely will not do — the answer may legitimately come in several forms, say — you can supply your own comparator script named compare.sh. When present, it replaces the standard comparison entirely. Most challenges do not need one; reach for it when the four modes above cannot express what “correct” means for your problem.

Giving students a workspace

A workbench bundle is the set of files that appear in the student’s working directory when they start: a starter file with the skeleton filled out, sample data, whatever they need. You can attach one to any challenge, not only a program.

Files can be text you write in the Studio, or attachments you add — the Studio reports an attachment’s name, type and size rather than pretending you can edit a binary in a text box.

A few names are reserved for the platform’s own use and will be refused: question.md, .workbench-directory.json, .workbench-config.json, and anything ending .preserved. There are limits on total size and file count, and the Studio shows you where you stand against them as you build the bundle, rather than failing at the end.

Two things it will warn about without blocking you, because both are sometimes deliberate:

A terminal that opens in the right place

Right-click ▸ Text ▸ Insert ▸ Merlin Terminal ▸ Challenge, then pick your challenge. This puts a working terminal into your lesson page, and — the important part — it opens already in that challenge’s directory, with the student’s starter files in front of them.

There is also Merlin Terminal ▸ Empty for a plain terminal that starts wherever the student’s shell would normally start.

Put the terminal in the panel where the student does the work, right under your instructions. Do not make them find it.

Try it: make a program challenge that asks students to double every number in the input. Write the generator, choose Integer per line, add a starter file with the reading loop filled in, and insert a Challenge terminal beneath the instructions.

11. Testing it yourself

Before any student sees a program challenge, run it yourself, for real.

Open the challenge and use Test in Workbench. The Studio publishes your lesson into a private practice area that only you can see, generates the data, compiles and runs it, grades the output, and drops you into a terminal in the resulting directory. It is not a simulation — it is the same machinery your students will meet.

One thing to expect: Test in Workbench republishes the whole lesson, not just the challenge you are testing. So every challenge in the lesson has to be valid first — no duplicate names, no empty questions, no half-written generator — before any single one of them can be tested. If it refuses, read the message: it is usually telling you about a different challenge than the one you are looking at.

Test the awkward cases deliberately. Submit a correct program. Then submit one that is right for ordinary input and wrong for your planted edge case, and check the partial score is what you intended a student to see.

12. Publishing and assigning

Two separate steps, and the distinction matters. Publishing makes a finished version of the lesson. Assigning gives a specific class a specific deadline.

Publish

File ▸ Publish…

If it is greyed out, you have unsaved changes. Save first. The Studio will not publish a draft it has not seen saved, because the published version has to be exactly what you last reviewed.

The wizard collects everything up front — which space, which course, and which catalog lesson (a new one, or an existing entry you are updating) — so that once it starts, it runs through without stopping to ask you things.

Its last page is a pre-publish check. It looks for duplicate or unnamed challenges, questions with no content, generators that do not write their files, and workbench bundles that break the rules. Naming problems come with a one-click fix that renames and re-saves for you. Warnings are shown but do not block you.

Then it works through seven steps, telling you where it is: checks, copying your pictures somewhere permanent, writing the lesson, registering it in the course catalog, creating the questions, recording the publication, and saving your draft’s state.

Two things worth knowing:

You can publish the same lesson repeatedly. Later publishes update rather than duplicate.

Assign

File ▸ Assign…

Assigning works from your most recent publication, so publish first. And an assignment delivers a lesson’s questions — if you published a lesson with no challenges, there is nothing to assign, and the Studio tells you so rather than creating an empty assignment.

Three steps:

  1. Space.
  2. Section — the class. Only sections of the published lesson’s course are offered.
  3. The assignment itself — a name (this is what students see, so write it for them), Available from, an optional Accept until for a late window, and Visibility.

Visibility defaults to Published — students see it immediately. A Draft assignment is invisible to students, which is useful while you are setting up a term and not what you want when you are ready to teach.

Students find the assignment on their Student Lab home page, through the next thing due in their section.

Try it: publish your Scratch lesson to your development space and assign it to a practice section. Then open Student Lab, find it, and do your own assignment as a student. Everything you have built looks different from that side.

Where to go next

You now know what the Studio can do. The next thing to read builds one real lesson end to end and shows you the decisions — why a lesson is sequenced the way it is, what makes a question worth grading, where to stop and talk: