A platform block is a class period where students work through assigned Trace activities on their own devices at their own speed while you circulate. This page covers what to have ready before the bell, what to watch on screen during the period, and what to do afterwards.
Get three things ready before the period#
The assignment has to be open. Open your class, press Assignments in the sidebar, and check that today's work carries the Open badge. A Scheduled assignment is invisible to students until its moment arrives, so a class staring at an empty Due soon list is usually a schedule that has not fired yet. You can move it by pressing Edit on the row and choosing Publish now.
Students need to be signed in and on the right page. Their work appears on their Home page under "Due soon", and each student opens it from there.
Read today's lesson plan. Press Resources in the sidebar under Classroom, open the chapter, and stay on the Guide tab. The Lesson timeline table lists every lesson with its Mode, and a lesson whose mode includes "platform" is a platform block. Below the table, that lesson's own block gives you Collect or check (what to have in hand by the end), Prerequisite, If ahead, and If behind, followed by the teaching notes for each article and lab in it. The lab notes are the part worth reading twice, because they name the stuck points you are about to meet.
What students are doing#
A package is one grid square of the course: one to five articles, one lab, and one quiz. Most of a platform block is students moving through that square.
They read the articles first. Then they run the lab, an interactive simulation they explore by changing things and watching what happens, and they finish it by writing a short reflection and saving the run. Each lab words its own save button, most often Save my evidence, and it changes to Evidence saved once the run is recorded. Saving is blocked until the reflection box has something in it.
Then they take the package quiz, which is five multiple-choice questions with four options each. The app will not record the quiz as finished until every answer is correct, and it tells the student to answer all five correctly and try another run. At the end of a unit there is a unit test, which draws 25 questions from a larger bank and needs 80% of the auto-checked questions right.
Mastery in Trace means one specific thing. A package is mastered when the student has saved a lab run for it and answered every quiz question correctly. A unit is mastered when the student passes its unit test and holds every package in that unit. Trace never assigns a grade, and none of these records is one.
What to watch on the class Overview#
Leave the class Overview section open on your own screen. Four cards run across the top: Students, Average completion, Students need a look, and Open assignments. Each one opens the section behind it.
Due soon lists the assignments closest to their due day. Waiting for review lists turned-in work nobody has opened yet, which during a platform block is usually empty, since only project submissions and worksheet submissions ever wait for review. Articles, labs, and quizzes are recorded as finished without anything to review.
Who needs a look is the panel to watch while you circulate. It names up to five students, each with the reasons underneath in plain sentences. Trace never shows that count on its own. The reasons come from four checks:
- Unfinished, when a student opened an activity and did not finish it.
- Repeated tries, after three or more attempts on an activity still not finished.
- Overdue, when the student's own due date has passed and the work is not finished. If you gave that student an extension, the extended date is the one used.
- No recent activity, when nothing assigned has been opened in seven days, or ever.
A name in that panel opens the student's drawer with everything they have open right now.
Unstick the three that come up most#
The lab will not let them save. Almost always the reflection box is empty or close to it. The save button stays disabled until the student has written something, and if they get past that and still see an error, Trace asks them to "Add an observation before completing this activity". Ask what they changed and what happened, and have them write that sentence.
The quiz sent them back to the start. A package quiz is five fixed questions, and a student who misses one takes it again from the top. That is how the design works, so treat a second attempt as normal and a fourth as a signal that the articles need a second pass. The lesson block's article notes list the misconceptions behind the usual wrong answers.
They skipped the articles and went for the lab. The lab uses numbers the articles already walked through by hand, so a student who skipped ahead tends to push sliders without a prediction. Send them back to the article the lab notes name, and ask them to predict before they move anything.
Regroup points and fast finishers#
The chapter pack plans a regroup point for each platform-block lesson, meaning the moment to stop the room and ask the whole class one question, along with work for students who finish early and notes on the lab's stuck points. Those three fields are part of the lesson plan the pack ships, though the Guide tab does not display them yet. The lab notes further down the same lesson block do carry the stuck-point guidance in prose, and the lesson's If ahead line gives you fast-finisher work.
After the block#
Open Progress and read the Done column, which is finished-of-assigned for each student, and the Needs attention column, which expands into its reasons. Current work shows what each student had open last, with the attempt count.
If the block included a worksheet or an Agent Builder project, open the assignment from Assignments and press Mark reviewed on the submissions you looked at, or Write a note to send the student a short comment, which marks the work reviewed at the same time. A review mark records that you looked. It carries no score.
What this page does not do#
- Trace does not assign a grade, compute a score, or rank students.
- The Overview does not refresh by itself while you watch it. Reload the page to see the last few minutes of work.
- You cannot see a student's screen from Trace, and you cannot open their lab and finish it for them.
- Labs, articles, and quizzes cannot be marked reviewed. Only project and worksheet submissions can.
- Nothing here sends you an alert. You see the class Overview when you open it.