Prep a class
Before class you build a stack of cards — an explanation, a question, a poll — and put them in the order you will use them. During class you hand them out one at a time.
Before you start
What you need
- A class with at least one session in it.
- An idea of what you are teaching that day.
- 20–40 minutes, less once you are used to it.
What you will have
- A stack of cards in teaching order.
- Polls ready to run during class.
- Reading material your students can go back to afterwards.
The three stages of a session
Every session has three tabs across the top, and you use them in order on the day you teach.
| Tab | When | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Prep | Before class | Write your cards and polls, and put them in order. This page. |
| Live | During class | Stream your video and hand out the cards you prepared. |
| Review | After class | Mark the practice work students did during the lesson. |
Beside the tabs is a badge showing whether the session is Scheduled, Live or Ended, and the button that moves it between those states.
Open the Prep tab
From your class, go to Sessions and open the session you are preparing. You land on Prep.
The page has three parts:
- Add a card, on the left — where you write everything.
- Prepared cards and polls, on the right — your stack, in order.
- Private notes, also on the right — your own reminders. Students never see these. Good for “ask about last week’s homework” or “stop here if we are running late”.
Add your cards
In Add a card, pick the kind of card you want, fill it in, and save it. It appears in the stack on the right. Repeat until your lesson is built.
A typical hour-long lesson is somewhere between six and twelve cards: a few explanations, a couple of questions, a poll to check everyone is following, and one longer piece of practice.
Card types in full
There are five kinds. Here is when to use each.
Concept card — for explaining
The workhorse. A title, an explanation, and optionally a list of key points and a worked example. Two extras are worth knowing about:
- A video. You can paste a YouTube link, or ask Lumi to find a good explainer video for the topic and attach it for you.
- A diagram. Switch on the diagram option and Lumi draws a simple teaching diagram to go with the explanation.
Practice exercise — for doing
A task students work through and submit while you watch the answers come in. You give it a title, the problem itself, an optional scenario to set the scene, and a difficulty of easy, medium or hard.
You also pick how students answer. The last five in this list are self-marking, which means you see who got it right without reading every submission.
| Answer type | What the student does | Marks itself? |
|---|---|---|
| Short answer | Types a sentence or two. | No — you read them. |
| Write code | Writes a program. | No — you read them. |
| Debug (explain) | Explains what is wrong with something. | No — you read them. |
| Fill the blanks | Types the missing words into gaps. | Yes |
| Predict the output | Says what a piece of code or process will produce. | Yes |
| Spot the bug | Points at the line that is wrong. | Yes |
| Order the steps | Drags steps into the right order. | Yes |
| Match pairs | Matches items in one column to another. | Yes |
Multiple choice — for quick checks
A question, four options, one right answer, and an explanation students see afterwards. Fast to write and fast to answer.
Poll — for opinions and temperature checks
A question with between two and four choices. Unlike multiple choice, a poll is not necessarily about right and wrong — use it for “which of these should we do next?” or “how confident do you feel about this?”. You can reveal the correct answer when you close the poll if there is one.
Interactive lesson — for hands-on topics
Search the library of built interactive lessons and attach one. These are small explorable activities — sliders, simulations, visualisations — that suit topics students learn better by playing with than by hearing about.
Generate with Lumi
You do not have to write every card from scratch. On each card form there is a sparkle button: type a topic — “eigenvectors”, “photosynthesis”, “the causes of the First World War” — press it, and Lumi drafts the card for you.
Always read what comes back before saving. Lumi is quick and usually good, but it does not know your class. Adjust the wording, the difficulty and the examples so they sound like you.
Pull from your course
If you have attached a course to this class, the Course content panel on the Prep page lets you pull material straight out of it — the explanations and practice you already wrote — instead of authoring it again.
This is the main practical reason to build a course: your weekly prep becomes picking from material you already have rather than writing from nothing.
Order the queue
Your prepared cards sit in a list on the right, and that list is the order you will teach in. Drag a card to move it, or use the arrows. Get this right now and your live lesson becomes a matter of pressing one button at a time.
Materials and leftovers
Materials is the reading list for your class — the place students go back to after the lesson to revise. It is separate from what you pushed live.
- Any card you push during class is added to Materials automatically.
- You can add a card to Materials without pushing it, using the toggle on the card.
- Push all cards to Materials at the top of the page adds the whole stack in one go — handy at the end of a lesson.
- Polls never go into Materials. They only make sense live.
Cards you did not get to
Lessons overrun. There are two buttons for what is left over:
- Push unpushed cards to Materials — give students the material to read on their own.
- Move unpushed to next session — carry them forward and teach them next week.
Resetting a session
If you need to run a session again from scratch — you were practising, or something went wrong — the Reset button in the session header puts it back to Scheduled.
| Reset clears | Reset keeps |
|---|---|
| Which cards were pushed (they go back to “not pushed”), poll answers, questions students asked, the class pulse, practice answers and attendance corrections. | Everything already saved to Materials, and the cards themselves — you do not have to write your lesson again. |