Activities

You'll create an activity for anything you expect your students to do over the course of your project. By starting with a basic activity type (e.g., poll or post) and customizing its settings, you can define how your students will interact with the site and each other.

You can also add functionality to the site by creating "Teacher Only" activities for yourself.

Available activity types

Action: Students tell you what they're trying to do, you (or a roll of the dice) decide what happens next.

Avatar: Allow students to upload a profile picture of their character.

Character Name: Prompt students to set their character's name at the beginning of a simulation.

Character Title: Prompt students to set their character's title at the beginning of a simulation.

Link: Share content from other sites.

Messages: Extend the built-in Messages functionality to create different messaging capabilities for different students by creating Messages activities.

Offline Activity: Provide off-platform feedback for on-platform work. You might do this if you're using the site's Progress page to keep track of your students' grades or if you want to convert points earned offline into game world currency.

One-liner: Submit a small amount of text (up to 280 characters) for display on the site. These make great social media posts, poll ballots, or team slogans.

Poll: Create your own ballot or generate one with character names, team names, or activity content.

Post: Submit rich text, images, and/or video. This will likely be your most frequently used activity type.

Creating an Activity

Click the New Activity button on the Activities page to get started. First, you'll be prompted to choose an activity type.

Next, name the activity and write a description.

Students will see the description as they submit the activity, so you can include brief instructions there. For more in-depth instructions, use the Submission Instructions panel in Activity Settings.

Next, you'll use Activity Settings to determine how students will interact with your new activity.

Managing Activity Content

You can moderate, edit, and view revision history for activity content on the Overview page or via the ••• menu attached to an individual piece of content.

Editing and Moderating Content

Click Edit, Deactivate, or Activate to edit and moderate content.

Content that's been edited will display an indicator at the bottom of its metadata block:

Edited at 02/18/16 9:48 am

Content that's inactive will is well appear with a yellow "Inactive" header and is only visible to teachers and the content submitter.

By default, new content is activated immediately and you can deactivate anything that does not meet your standards. You can set up proactive moderation in activity settings.

Revision History

When activity content is edited, you'll see an update on your Overview page showing what changed. You can also access the revision history for a submission using its ••• menu.

Anyone who has permission to edit a submission can also see its revision history.

If you give teammates permission to edit each other's submissions, they'll also be able to leave comments on the revision history for those submissions.

Editing conflicts

If someone tries to edit a post while another person is editing it, the site will display a warning message and suggest trying again later. It is possible to override this warning if you are confident that no one else is actively editing the document. Revision history will prevent data loss in these cases. For real-time collaboration we recommend using a dedicated collaboration tool like Google Docs. Text can then be submitted to the site as a Post.

For shorter form activities like one-liners, avatars, and links, we don't block simultaneous editing. If an editing conflict occurs, students can easily review recent revision history and decide how to proceed.

Changing Authors (teachers only)

As a teacher, you can change the author of a post on the edit page. This functionality is only available before a post has been graded.

Changing Avatars (posts, action outcomes only) (teachers only)

Normally, a post is accompanied by its author's avatar image. If you'd like to use a different avatar for just one post, you can do so here.

Activity Settings

Each panel of the Activity Settings page controls a different aspect of an activity's behavior. There are a lot of options here and most have sensible defaults. Quickly scan the summaries of each panel and click Edit when you need to make changes.

Activity settings are automatically saved as you edit them.

Activity Settings Panels

Below you'll find a list of all the settings panels available for your activities. Depending on the activity type, you'll see a subset of these panels.

Who can submit?

You can limit submissions to teachers only, students with a certain role and/or members of a certain team.

How many?

Determine how many times students can submit an activity and whether they're allowed to submit extra.

Check the Count by Team box to count submissions and grade the activity on a per-team basis instead of per-student.

Where does this go?

Everything students submit appears on the Dossier. Here, you can also designate a page for content from this activity to appear on.

If you choose a page, only students who have access to that page will be able to see content generated by this activity.

If you choose "Dossier Only," you can choose from the following visibility options:

• Everyone
• Teammates Only
• Submitter Only

When does this activity open and close?

Determine whether this activity opens and closes manually (using the Open/Close switches in Activities or Edit Page) or as part of a stage. You can also create a new stage here.

Moderate submissions?

When moderation is checked, submissions of an activity must be activated by a teacher on the Overview page before they appear anywhere else on the site. You'll be notified in Up Next when this happens. If moderation is disabled, you can still deactivate submissions on the Overview page].

Allow editing? (posts, links, and one-liners only)

When you allow it, students can edit submissions by clicking the appropriate Edit button on either the Dossier or Profile pages. Edits can only be made while the activity remains open and before the submission has been graded. Editing options:

• No editing after submission: submissions can't be edited (unless you return for edits on the grading page).

• Submitter can edit: students can edit their own submissions.

• Submitter's teammates can edit and comment: students can edit their teammates' submissions, view revision history, and comment on revisions.

Charge money to submit?

If you've given your students bank accounts within the simulation, you can charge for each submission of an activity by entering a cost here. Students will only be allowed to proceed if they have enough money in their accounts. Submissions must be priced in whole dollars (or units of currency, if you use a custom unit).

Custom Instructions

• Submission Instructions are optional instructions included alongside the submission form for an activity. Since students can reference these while they craft their submission, they're a great place to list requirements and objectives. If your activity was a worksheet, these would be the directions at the top of the page.

• Post-Submit Messages appear after an activity is successfully submitted. If you leave this blank, students will see something like "Post submitted."

Finally, each activity type has its own settings panels that will appear in yellow on the activity settings page. You can learn more about an activity's settings in the documentation for each activity below.

Action

When your students want their characters to do something influenced by factors outside their control in the game world, they submit an action to the site. In a military simulation, this could be moving troops. In a campaign simulation, this could be trying to raise money from a major donor.

When students submit an action, they're asked an open ended question: what are you trying to do? A good action contains an argument for why their action would succeed and an explanation of why the character is acting in the first place.

The action then gets sent to your Action Required feed where you can decide what happens next.

Every action attempt and outcome is collected on the Actions Page.

Activity Settings

Associates

In many simulations, students will want to attempt actions in collaboration with their peers. Sometimes, a student's character wouldn't even be able to attempt certain actions without a teammate's support.

Check the associates checkbox to require students to list characters who have agreed to support them on the Action submission form.

Associates will be prompted to join or reject the action. The action will only advance to your Action Required feed if all associates agree to join. If you'd like, you can manually process actions with rejected or pending associates in the main Overview feed.

Processing Actions

Once a student submits an action, you determine what happens in the game world.

To process an action, find it on the Action Required feed and click the Process Action button.

You'll be prompted to review the student's action and enter the odds of success for the action. Enter a number from 1 to 100 and click Submit.

When you click submit, the site will provide a general outcome for the action – e.g., "Failure! Worse than expected."

From there, you decide what happens. The site gives you three tools to engineer the simulation world consequences of your student's action. You can post a News Story announcing the action's outcome, you can send a private message to the student explaining what happened, and/or you can add or remove money from the student's bank account (if banking is enabled) based on the outcome of the action.

All action outcomes, public and private, appear on the Actions Page.

Canned Action Outcomes

You can write outcomes for common student actions in advance to save time later, or save outcomes for reuse as you process actions.

Just like any standard action outcome, canned outcomes can be public or secret, they can have a title, a body, and a custom avatar image, and if you use the platform's banking feature they can add or remove funds from a user or team's account.

Access all of your canned outcomes by clicking the Edit Canned Outcomes button on the Activity Settings page for any action activity. You can create, edit, and delete canned outcomes there.

Whenever you process an action, you'll have the option to use any of your canned outcomes. Click a canned outcome's "Publish" button to publish immediately, or the "Edit First" button to make changes first.

Canned Action Keywords

When editing a canned outcome, you can use the :user: and :team: keywords to automatically insert the action submitter's name or team name into the outcome. If the associates keyword is enabled, you can also include a list of invited associates with the :associates: keyword.

Keywords respect capitalization, so you could also use :Team: at the beginning of a sentence. For example, the headline "Windfall for :team:! :User: discovers gold under the mountain" might be published as "Windfall for Green Team! Jayden P. discovers gold under the mountain."

Ignoring actions

If you don't plan to process an action, click the Ignore button in the Action Required Feed. Ignored actions will be removed from the Action Required Feed but can still be processed in the main Overview feed and on the Grading page.

Reviewing action outcomes

All actions and their outcomes, public and private, appear on the Actions Page.

As a teacher, you'll see everyone's actions and outcomes on that page.

Students will see their own actions and actions they were invited to join as an associate.

If an action results in a private outcome, only the student who submitted it and associates who joined the action will see that outcome (not associates who rejected or ignored the request).

You can also see all actions, and their outcomes, on both the Overview page and the Grading page.

Customizing actions

If you'd like, we can build custom action behavior for your simulation. We can easily incorporate custom probability factors based on students' character traits, custom outcome capabilities, and custom automation based on your needs. Contact support to get started.

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Avatar

A student's Avatar, or profile picture, is used to represent their character around the site. You can manually set a student's avatar by uploading it on the edit student page. That said, it's easier for you and more fun for everyone if students find (or design) their own avatars. To enable this functionality, you create an avatar activity.

From Upload to Profile

When students submit an avatar activity, you see the newly uploaded avatar on the Overview page and can edit or grade it like any other activity submission.

However, depending on your moderation settings, the new avatar may not appear on a student's profile right away.

When an avatar is set to active, either automatically or manually on the Overview page, it appears on a student's profile. When it's set to inactive or you deactivate it, it's removed from that student's profile. That means...

• If moderation is enabled in Activity Settings, the newly uploaded avatar won't actually be added to a student's profile until you activate it on the Overview page.

• If moderation isn't enabled, the new avatar will appear on the student's profile right away.

How many, how often

Each available submission of an Avatar activity allows a user to change their avatar once.

For example, if you choose "as many as they want" under "How many times?" in Activity Settings, students can continue to change their avatar for as long as the activity is open.

Alternatively, if you limit students to exactly one submission in Activity Settings, they'll be able to upload an avatar once and then will have to wait until you assign another Avatar to change it.

No matter how often students change their avatars (or you change an avatar on a student's behalf), you can always see all their past avatar submissions on the Dossier, Overview, and Grading pages.

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Character Name

Prompt students to set the name of their character on the site. This activity works exactly the same way as the Avatar activity, immediately above.

Remember, just like avatars, a students' character name is attached to all of their past, present, and future submissions. When you allow students change their character name, it will retroactively change the name that appears alongside all of their submissions. If you're creating a Character Name activity because you want students to create a new character, you probably want to use the Persona feature instead.

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Character Title

Prompt students to set the title of their character (e.g., President) on the site. This activity works exactly the same way as the Avatar and Character Name activities above.

Remember, just like avatars, a students' character title is attached to all of their past, present, and future submissions. When you allow students change their character title, it will retroactively change the title that appears alongside all of their submissions.

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Messages

The built-in Messages feature allows students to chat in real time on the site. If you'd like, you can create additional Messages activities to create different Messages rules for different students.

Learn more about Messages, and creating additional activities, in the documentation for Messages.

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Link

The Link activity embeds content from other sites. The page's title, an image, and a short text summary are included in the embedded summary, and students can edit the summary before they share the link.

Links can can optionally embed rich media (e.g., a youtube video) directly onto the site.

This is a great way to allow characters to try to persuade each other with outside sources, or to build a bibliography on the site (maybe in a Profile Tab).

Customizing Link Summaries

When you submit a link, you'll see a preview of the link summary that will be embedded on the site. You can optionally click on the body, image, or the title of the summary to edit it.

Activity Settings

Embed rich media

By default, link activities only display a title, preview, and thumbnail image. Check the Embed rich media checkbox to pull rich media content (like YouTube videos, Marvel Apps, and Flipgrid responses) directly into the site.

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Offline Activity

Sometimes you'll want to bring work completed elsewhere into your simulation. Maybe you're using the site's Progress page to keep track of your student's grades, or maybe you're using the banking feature and want to convert student quiz grades into in-game currency.

An Offline Activity generates a new submission for each of your students that you can grade.

Type a name for the activity, then click Submit, and you'll be taken to the grading page to enter grades for the offline work.

Offline Activities are automatically grouped into an archived stage on the Activities page to keep them out of your way.

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One-liner

Submit a very small amount of text for display on the site. These make great poll ballots, team slogans, or Twitter-style social media posts.

Activity Settings

Template

Choose from one of two templates for your one-liners.

• Banner: a big, colorful way to share short text.

• Standard: styled like a social media post.

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Poll

Create a poll ballot of students, characters, teams, or activity submissions for your students to vote on.

You can optionally require (and assess) explanations for each vote. Poll results can be streamed live or published after the fact to the built-in Polls Page and any other page you choose.

Types of Polls

When you create a new poll activity, you'll be asked to pick a ballot type. Once the poll is created, this setting can't be changed.

• Custom Ballot: create your own ballot from scratch.

You can also let the site generate a ballot for you:

• Team Ballot: each choice on the ballot will be the name of a team.

• Persona Ballot: each choice on the ballot will be a character's name, followed by the student's first name and last initial. If a student doesn't have a character name, the ballot will only show their first name and last initial.

• Activity Content Ballot: each choice on the ballot will be the full content of an activity submission. You can use any Post or One-liner activity to generate a poll ballot. One-liners, using the banner template, make great ballot choices for Activity Content polls.

Creating a Ballot

Custom Ballots

Type each ballot option into its own field on the edit ballot screen. If you need more fields, you can click the Add Option button at the bottom of the screen. Click the "x" button next to any field to delete it.

Generated Ballots (Team, Persona, or Activity Content)

The Edit Ballot screen shows a ballot as your students will see it, with all of the potential ballot options visible (that'd be every student, every team, or every submission from your chosen activity).

Click on the options you'd like to appear on the ballot, or click Select All to include everything. You need at least two options to create a ballot.

Automatically add activity submissions to a ballot

When you generate an Activity Content ballot, new submissions can automatically be added to the ballot as students submit them. This allows you to set up activity content polls far in advance. You'll find this option on the New Ballot and Edit Ballot screens.

Activity Settings

Allow Students to Vote for Themselves

By default, students can't vote for themselves, their own team, or their own submissions. Check the Allow Students to Vote for Themselves checkbox to remove this restriction.

Require Explanation

Students are asked to explain their choice after they vote in a poll. This gives them a chance to justify their decision making and explain why they believe their character would vote the way that they did. Uncheck the Require Explanation checkbox to skip this step.

Randomize Ballot Order

Shuffles the order of the choices on the ballot. It can be helpful to turn this off if students will be voting in a series of similar polls (e.g. in a series of "Yes" / "No" votes, you won't want "Yes" and "No" to keep swapping positions.)

Enable Guest Voting

To open this poll to voters outside of your class, check the Enable Guest Voting checkbox. You can learn more about Guest Voting below.

Editing a ballot

You can edit the ballot for any ongoing poll by clicking the corresponding Edit Ballot button on the Overview Page. Any options that students have already voted for will be highlighted in red.

If you remove those options, students who chose them will be able to vote again. If you've already graded those votes, the grades and comments will be deleted. The site will warn you of this possibility and there's always an opportunity to undo any deletion of grades or comments.

On a custom poll ballot, you can also edit the text of existing options. Ballots of students who have already voted for the option will be updated to reflect the new text.

Running a Poll

Once you've created a Poll Activity, you can manage the poll on the Overview page under Action Required.

Click Edit ballot to make changes to the poll ballot before you open the poll.

There are shortcuts on the Overview page to open and close any poll activity that's currently running. If the poll is part of a stage on the Activity Settings page, those shortcuts will toggle the whole stage instead.

On the Overview page, when a poll is open, you'll see a list of students who haven't yet voted. When a poll is closed, you'll see a preview of the poll results.

Live results

Once a poll is open, you can stream live poll results to the Polls page (and its Home page preview) by checking the Show live results on Polls page checkbox on the Overview page. A bar chart will update in real-time as students vote.

Cancelling a Poll

Before students begin to vote, you can click the "Cancel" button on the poll's Action Required widget on the Overview page.

Once students have started voting, close the poll and click "Save without Publishing". The poll results will be saved but the poll will be removed from your action required feed and students won't ever see the results.
If you're showing live results, you'll click "Unpublish" instead of "Save without Publishing".

Once you do cancel or save a poll, you won't be able to open it again.

Voting

As always, students vote using the Submit New menu.

If you allow more than one ballot submission (in activity settings) students will be prompted to vote again after they submit their ballot.

Ending a Poll

When all of your students have voted or you're ready to end a poll, you can view or publish the results on the Overview page.

1. If the poll is open, close it.

2. View, publish, or save the results.

   • To view or publish: click the Publish button to see the results in detail and optionally share them with students. You'll be prompted to write a News Story about the poll results. See Publishing Results below for more detail on this process.

   • To save or ignore: Click Save without Publishing to ignore the results for now. The poll will be removed from your Action Required feed. You can find it later in your Everything feed and publish it from there.

Once you've ended a poll by publishing or saving it, the poll's activity will be moved to a Completed Polls stage on the activities page and you won't be able to open the poll again.

Publishing Results

You view and publish results in the Poll Outcome view. This view has two sections: the editor column, on the left, and the results column, on the right.
On mobile, the results appear below the editor.

In the editor column you can write a summary of the poll results to share with your students. We've found it's best to write it as a news story in the style of other content on the page you publish it to.

• Where do you want to post this? Publish to a custom page you've built or only to the Polls page. If you choose one of your pages, only people with access to that page will be able to see the results.
• Title: a headline for the results post. The site will write one for you.
• Chart Type: choose a chart design for the results post, bar or donut.
• Body: (optional) You can compose your own body for the article or copy and paste students' vote explanations from within the results column.

The results column is organized by ballot option. You can preview the chart of your results and read students' explanations for their votes. Use the "Jump to results" menu to jump to each ballot option in the results column.

Use the Copy and Insert buttons below each explanation to quickly add student commentary to your results.

Click the Publish button to save and post the results.

Published results can be edited on the Overview page.

Grading and Returning Votes

Students' votes and explanations, like anything else they submit to the site, can be graded and returned for editing on the grading page.

When you return a vote for edits, the student can change their vote and/or their explanation. If a student changes their vote after you've published the results, you'll be notified on the Overview page and can decide whether to leave the results as-is or update the story you've published.

Guest Voting

You can invite outsiders to weigh in on your simulation by creating a poll with Guest Voting enabled. This is a great way to incorporate realistic feedback into your simulation and establish a dialogue with the world outside the classroom.

To set up guest voting, contact support with a list of guest voters' email addresses. Then check the guest voting box on any polls you want to give those voters access to.

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Post

Submit rich text, images, and/or video. This will likely be your most frequently used activity type.

Activity Settings

Post Type

Posts can include text, images, and/or a video.

Options

• Any: accept any combination of text, image, and or video.
• Text: only accept rich text.
• Image: require an image upload, with optional text.
• Video: require a video upload, with optional text.

Public Citations

The post submission form includes a citation field. URLs within citations are automatically converted to links.

Options

• On: citations appear everywhere.
• Off: citations only appear on Teacher pages.

Sometimes you'll want students to be able to see each other's citations around the site. In other cases, citations may detract from the realism or strategic elements of your simulation. Citations might include strategic justifications for actions that other players shouldn't see, or they might just feel out of place on e.g., a News Page that's supposed to feel like a real news website.

A note about video uploads

Large videos can take a long time to upload! Be patient while waiting for an upload to complete – don't leave (or reload) the page. We recommend that your students compress their videos for the web before they upload them. Most software that they'd use to capture a video has this functionality.

Furthermore, unlike text and images, videos take time to process before they can be shown on your site. When a student uploads a video, the site will begin to process the video and you'll see a "processing" spinner on your Overview page. When the video is ready, it will appear on the site. If you've enabled moderation for the video activity, it will instead appear in your pending feed.