Student guide
A challenge is not an essay prompt with an answer hidden somewhere. It is a conversation where your questions, evidence, revisions, and explanations are the work. This guide walks through every screen you will use, in the order you will meet them, with pictures taken from the live product.
Workflow 1
Your teacher or institution sends you the address of the portal. It opens on a single card with a Sign in button and nothing to fill in: the portal does not hold your password, so there is no username box here.
Choosing Sign in opens a separate Microsoft window on top of the portal. Type the email address your teacher or institution used when they created your account - often a school address, but whichever address you gave them - and continue. Keep the portal tab open behind it; the window hands the sign-in back to that tab when it is finished.
Your account arrives with a temporary password that works once, handed to you by whoever created the account. Type it on the password screen, and Microsoft immediately asks you to choose a new password of your own; the temporary one stops working the moment you have. Nobody in the portal can see either password.
On every later sign-in the same window asks for the password you chose, with your email address shown above it so you can confirm you are signing in as yourself. This screen belongs to Microsoft rather than to the portal, which is why the portal never sees your password. If you have forgotten it, use the "Forgot password?" link here rather than asking your teacher to reset it in the portal.
The sign-in window closes by itself. The portal tab, which has been waiting behind it, loads your dashboard. Nothing needs to be clicked in between.
Before your dashboard appears for the first time, the portal shows you links to the privacy policy and the terms of use and asks you to tick both boxes and choose Agree. Nothing else loads until you do. Your answer is recorded against the version of each document you accepted, so you will only be asked again if one of them changes.
Workflow 2
The dashboard is the whole of your work in one list, headed "Challenges". There is no separate page of past sessions: each assignment keeps its own progress on its own row, so the row you started last week is the row you come back to.
Every row carries four things. The status says whether it is Not started, In progress, or Completed. Beneath it, an assignment made of several challenges says how far along the chain you are, as "Challenge 2 of 3", or "All challenges completed" once you have finished them all. A line of detail says how many turns you have taken, how long you have been working, and when you last did. A date appears on the rows that have one, whether or not you have started: Opens when the work is not available yet, Due while it is, and Closed once the closing date has passed. A row reads Cancelled when your teacher has withdrawn the assignment; opening a session it stopped shows "Cancelled by your teacher".
The button tells you what the row wants from you next. It reads Start challenge on work you have not opened, Resume on a challenge you are part-way through, and Review on one you have finished. Before the opening date and after the closing date there is no button at all - the portal will not start or continue work outside the window, though a challenge you finished stays reviewable. You never choose which challenge in a chain comes next; the portal opens the right one for you.
The search box filters the list as you type, matching on the assignment title. Two checkboxes sit next to it. Include completed brings back work you have already finished, which is hidden by default so the list stays focused on what is left. Include expired does the same for assignments whose closing date has passed.
The list shows ten assignments at a time. When you have more than that, Prev and Next buttons appear underneath it with a label reading "Page 1 of 2" between them. They are hidden when everything fits on one page, and searching or filtering puts you back on the first page.
Workflow 3
The button both creates the session and opens it, so there is no separate briefing page in between. What you see next is the challenge itself, already running.
The agent opens by setting out the scenario and what the challenge asks of you. Read the whole of it. The status strip at the top right says "In progress", and each turn is labelled with who spoke, so the conversation stays readable when you come back to it.
Type into the box at the bottom and choose Send response. What the Enter key does is your choice: by default it starts a new line and Ctrl and Enter together send, and you can swap that on the Options page. Send is reachable by pressing Tab either way, so you never need a mouse to take a turn.
An agent turn takes real time. While it is running, the response box is locked and a spinner appears beside the Send button, so a second Enter cannot send the same answer twice. The reply is added to the conversation above the box when it arrives.
Each challenge type has its own rules, and the agent runs by them: in a Socratic Constraint your questions are your progress, in a Devil's Advocate Loop the note on what you changed and why is what counts, in The Adversary the strength of the case you build for the other side is the grade. Follow what the type asks of you rather than guessing what the system wants.
Explain why evidence matters, name uncertainty, and revise your view when the conversation gives you a reason.
Workflow 4
Your session is saved as you go. Choose Dashboard in the navigation panel, close the tab, or shut the laptop; nothing is lost and nothing needs saving first.
Back on the dashboard, the row you were working on now reads In progress, its detail line counts the turns you have taken so far, and its button has changed to Resume.
Resume reopens the same conversation with everything you have already written still in it, scrolled to where you left off. You carry on in the same box at the bottom.
Workflow 5
You do not end a challenge yourself. The agent decides that the reasoning has run its course, and the status strip changes to say so. The response box is replaced by a result panel, because there is nothing left to send.
The panel carries a score and a short written summary of your reasoning. Treat the score as a signal rather than a verdict; the useful part is the summary and the point in the conversation where your thinking became clearer or needed a different path.
A finished challenge stays on its dashboard row, marked Completed with a Review button. Tick Include completed if you cannot see it: completed work is hidden by default. Review reopens the whole conversation with its result, exactly as it was.
Workflow 6
On a wide screen the panel is docked open beside the page, as in the pictures above. On a phone or a narrow window it is hidden until you choose the menu button at the top left, and then it slides over the page. It holds Dashboard, Options, links to the privacy policy and terms of use, and Sign out.
Options offers a light theme, a dark theme, or following whatever your device is set to. The choice is remembered on your account, so it follows you to another machine.
The second setting decides how you send a turn. Either Enter starts a new line and Ctrl and Enter send, or Enter sends and Shift and Enter start a new line. Pick whichever matches the other tools you write in.
Sign out opens a short Microsoft window that ends the session and closes itself. The portal returns to the sign-in card, ready for the next person. Sign out on a shared or school machine; closing the tab alone does not end the session.
Internal agent instructions and checkpoint rules stay hidden during an active challenge. That protects the challenge from becoming a puzzle of guessing the grading system.
