Trace gives you a library of lessons and labs about how AI works, a class to assign that material to, and an Agent Builder where students drag typed blocks onto a canvas, connect them, and run the result with a real model and approved tools. The library is organized and assignable, and you choose what fits your class.
Trace does not assign a grade, and it computes no score and no mastery level. It is also not a general-purpose AI tutor or a place for students to use AI on schoolwork for another class.
The three roles#
Everyone on Trace signs up as a student, a teacher, or a school or district administrator, and the choice is made once at sign-up.
A teacher working alone signs up at /sign-up and picks "Teacher or
educator". A teacher at a school that already has a Trace organization is
invited from the school portal instead. Students sign up with an email
address, a username, a password, and their date of birth; students under 13
must choose "Student joining a classroom" and enter your class code during
sign-up. School and district administrators come in through the "School or
district" sign-up. They set up the organization, handle billing, and invite
teachers, and they do not teach or take lessons.
The role cannot be changed from inside the app, so it is worth watching the sign-up choice. If someone picked the wrong one, press Help in the sidebar and send us a message.
The sidebar, group by group#
Once you have a class, your sidebar opens with that class's own name over its five sections: Overview, Students, Assignments, Progress, and AI activity. The address bar owns which class you are in, so switching classes from the top bar keeps you on the same section and swaps the class underneath it.
Below the class sit Calendar and Messages. Calendar is a planning view of what is due across your classes. Home appears only while you have no class yet, because once you have one, Trace sends you straight to its overview.
Then a group labelled Classroom holds Classes (every class you teach, with archived ones under their own divider), Resources (the chapter resource packs and your worksheets), and My files (your own folders, notes, and imported materials).
Last comes Learn & build, with Lessons (the whole library, and the one place work gets assigned) and Agent Builder. A Manage group appears only for school administrators and for staff accounts that have Studio or Admin access.
The two ways a class uses Trace#
In a platform block, students work through the assigned articles, labs, and quizzes at their own pace while you circulate, help students who are stuck, and decide when to pause the whole class for a debrief. In a taught lesson, you teach from a slide deck with a worksheet and an exit ticket, and the platform holds the practice rather than the instruction. A chapter's pack marks, lesson by lesson, which mode it expects. The course guide explains how to choose between them and how to pace a chapter.
What Trace records#
Trace records that work happened. For each student you can see which activities they finished, which lab runs they saved, how they answered the questions on a quiz or unit test, which worksheets they submitted, and how much AI usage the class has drawn from your plan's credit balance. You can read the conversations students have had with the tutor or their agents, read-only, and every view is logged.
None of that becomes a grade. There is no score column, no mastery percentage, and no way to export one. The progress CSV carries completion and nothing else. Mark reviewed records that you looked at a piece of work, Write a note sends the student short feedback, and neither one carries a score.
The one judgment the app makes for you is "needs attention", and it always arrives with its reasons next to it: unfinished work, repeated tries, past the student's own due date, or a week with nothing opened. A bare count never appears anywhere in the app.
What this page does not do#
- It does not walk you through creating a class or adding students. Start with "Getting started for teachers".
- It does not cover assigning work, reading the Progress table, building a worksheet, or running the Agent Builder. Each of those has its own page.
- It does not describe the student side of the app. The student guides cover what a student sees.
- It does not tell you what is in the course or how long a chapter takes. That is the course guide.