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Setting work
Set a piece of practice for a student or a group, see who has done it — and why your student is never shown a deadline.
Setting a piece of work
| What to call it | Your student sees this, so name it the way you would say it: "Fractions practice for Friday" rather than "Task 4". |
|---|---|
| Subject and topic | Leave the topic as Any topic in this subject for a mixed set. |
| How many questions | Between 6 and 20. The session is exactly that long. |
| Due | Optional, and only you ever see it — see below. |
| Who it's for | Any mix of groups and individual students. Pick them one at a time from the list — groups are at the top — and each appears as a chip you can remove. Underneath, a line tells you how many students it will actually reach. |
You are setting a shape of work — "ten Fractions questions" — not ten specific questions. The questions are chosen when your student starts, from the same library they practise with normally. That means work you set can never contain a question you have hidden, and never breaks because a question was retired or edited after you set it.
If a student already has five things waiting, setting a sixth is refused. A child looking at a list of nine outstanding tasks is not being helped by any of them — and in practice a backlog that long means the work is not being done at all, which is worth knowing rather than adding to.
Why your student never sees a deadline
This is the most deliberate decision in the feature, so it is worth being plain about.
The due date is information for you. It is how the Tasks screen tells you who has not finished. It is never sent to your student's device — not as a date, not as a countdown, not as a colour that changes, and never as anything marked overdue. A task set three weeks ago looks exactly the same to them as one set this morning.
Their home screen says who picked the work out for them and what it is. That is what makes a child do it. A ten-year-old preparing for a selective exam is already carrying a great deal, and a practice app that tells them they are late adds pressure without adding practice — most often to the child who is already struggling most.
If work is not getting done, you will see it on the Tasks screen, and you are far better placed to deal with it than a red badge is.
Seeing who has done it
Each row on Tasks shows how many students have finished — "3/5 done". Open one to see the names on each side, and the score of everyone who has finished.
Work marks itself. When your student completes a session they started from the task, it is recorded at the same moment their practice is — so a session that fails to save cannot leave a task looking done, and one that saves cannot leave it looking outstanding.
A student can only complete a task with work that actually matches it. A Maths session will not complete an English task, and a shorter session will not complete a longer one.
Changing your mind
Open a task and withdraw it. It disappears from your students' home screens, and the record that it was set — including anyone who had already done it — is kept. Nothing is deleted, because a student may already have done the work and that should not vanish because you mis-typed a title.
What happens offline
Tasks reach a device the next time it has a connection, along with everything else that syncs. Once there, they stay: a student can open the app on a train with no signal, see what you set, do it, and it records when they are back online. Nothing about work you set requires them to be connected at the moment they do it.
The Tasks tab is not on your screen. Setting work is a teaching act between a tutor and a student — in a family account there is no second adult for it to mean anything between, and your child's practice is already yours to direct directly.