Testing an Activity Before You Assign It

On the Activities page, every finished activity has a Try button. It runs the activity exactly as a student would experience it — same character, same voice, same pace, same scaffolding. This is the fastest quality check available, and it takes about two minutes.

Lemon says: Reading your own fields tells you what you meant. Running the activity tells you what you actually built.

The instinct is to have a fluent, cooperative conversation. That tests almost nothing. The interesting failures happen at the edges, so deliberately behave like the students who are going to struggle.

• Say something short and hesitant — does the character keep the conversation going naturally? (If you turned on Follow up after silence, go quiet and check the nudge too.)
• Say something in English — does the response match the setting you chose?
• Make a deliberate grammar mistake — is the correction behaviour what you intended?
• Go off-topic — does the character stay in role or drift into being an assistant?
• Say almost nothing for a few turns — does it repeat the same question?

Lemon says: Being a difficult student for ninety seconds tells you more than five minutes of being a good one.

The most common failure is running dry. Watch the clock during your test: if you've exhausted the scenario well before the minimum time, your students certainly will too, and they'll be stuck padding until the timer allows them to finish.

• Note roughly when the natural end of the conversation arrives
• Compare that to the minimum session time on Basic Info
• If the gap is large, add a complication rather than lowering the minimum

Lemon says: Lowering the minimum is the tempting fix. Adding a complication is the better one — it gives students more to say instead of less to do.

Almost every problem you'll find in testing falls into one of four categories, and each has a specific fix in a specific field.

Lemon says: Every one of these is a field you can fix in under a minute. The hard part is noticing, which is what testing is for.

The preparation screen is the first thing students encounter, and it's easy to forget it exists when you've been living in the editor. Your description and learning objectives appear here; your Help & Tips note appears once the conversation starts, under Details.

• Does the description explain what they'll be doing?
• Once the conversation starts, do the tips give them something to try and a way out when stuck?
• Is the session length going to feel reasonable to a nervous first-timer?

Lemon says: A student who understands the task before they start speaks about twice as much as one who's still working it out.

Run the session past the minimum time and finish it, so you can see the feedback report your students will get. This is the only way to check whether the areas you selected produce something useful for this particular activity.

• Does the feedback reference things that actually happened?
• Are the selected areas producing substance, or is one of them thin?
• If you enabled Cultural Appropriateness, is there enough cultural context for it to say anything?

Lemon says: If a feedback area produces two vague sentences, turn it off. A short, sharp report beats a padded one.