Getting started as staff

Courses and groups, topics and problems, progress, quizzes and managing your organisation's accounts.

This section is for teachers, their assistants and organisation administrators. How to sign in, and what the app looks like to a student, is in the section for students.

Home and activity

After signing in you land on Home: at the top, a calendar of your students’ submissions over the last year across all your courses; below it, a card for each course. A day’s popover names the busiest courses that day; no student is named there.

Activity is a live feed of your students’ submissions and Excel uploads. New entries appear by themselves; there is no need to reload the page.

A new course

Create a course with ＋ next to your courses in the sidebar, from search (Ctrl K), or under Administration → Courses.

Enter the title, the school year (a new one starts in September) and the organisation.
Start empty or from a copy of one of your courses. A copy takes the topics with their problem sets, their modes and late rules, the languages, the attempts per day and the starter code. Dates, members, submissions and individual tasks are never copied.
Add groups: their students are enrolled in the course.

Teachers and administrators of an organisation can create courses.

A course’s sections

Section	What it holds
Overview	How the course is going, and Needs attention.
Problems	Topics with their problems, deadlines and per-group schedules.
Quizzes	The course’s quizzes and their results.
Submissions	Every student submission; open a row to see the tests, compiler messages and similarity in a side panel.
Progress	The progress sheet: one strip per student.
Similarity	Pairs of similar solutions.
People	Students, groups and course staff.
Messages	Students’ questions and announcements.
Settings	General details, submission rules (languages, attempts per day, how much of a result students see), starter code and archiving the course.

Students no longer see an archived course. Staff can still read it, and a notice at the top of every page offers to restore it (owners and administrators).

Topics and problems

In Problems, create a topic (New topic) and add problems to it. Students see a topic as soon as it has problems.

Add problems opens the problem archive and problem sets: choose several problems and add them at once. Point at a problem to see its statement, samples, limits and where it is already used.
Reorder problems by dragging, or with ↑ ↓ while a problem’s handle has focus.
A topic’s dates can differ by group; Use the schedule for everyone makes them the same again.
If a list of problems is also used elsewhere, the app tells you before you change it.
You can give a student an individual problem in a topic slot: People → the student’s panel → Individual tasks.

The problem archive

Problems and problem sets live once, in the shared Problem archive; courses use them rather than copy them. A problem is public, shared with the organisation or private; collections keep them in order, and skills, difficulty bands and sources filter them.

New problem – a programming problem or an Excel task (chosen when it is created).
Write the statement in the editor: headings, lists, code, images and formulas. Its keys are on the keyboard shortcuts page.
Tests: paste them, upload files, or upload a whole ZIP; you see the pairs found before anything is imported. Files must be UTF-8 text.
Changes collect in a draft. Publishing turns the draft into a new version; students and the judge only see published versions, and a version with submissions is never changed.
An Excel task has grading rules, a starter workbook and an upload limit.

Progress and submissions

Progress shows one strip per student: problems solved, a tile per problem in course order, and a 14-day activity chart. Sort the sheet or export it as CSV. The arrow keys move between tiles and Enter opens the best attempt.

Submissions lists every submission in the course, newest first. The side panel shows the result, the tests, the code and a Similarity section.

Similarity compares accepted solutions with other students’ solutions of the same problem. Very short programs are not compared. Treat it as a hint where to look closer, not as proof; students never see it.

Quizzes

Keep questions in Question banks (in the problem archive): seven kinds of question, arranged in groups. In a course’s Quizzes, create a quiz (New quiz): how many questions to draw from each group and their points, the settings, the topic, and a time window for each group.

Every student gets a randomly drawn variant. It is stored when the attempt starts, so reloading the page carries on where it was.
The server keeps the time: answers are refused once it is up.
Single and multiple choice, short text, numbers and matching are marked automatically; open answers and files wait for you to mark them.
In tests, leaving the quiz window can be recorded. Treat it as a risk indicator, never as proof; results can be exported with the answers as CSV.

People and messages

Students reach a course through their group or by individual enrolment. In People you can add groups, enrol students and add staff, message a student, move them to another group, or remove them from the course.

For a student who forgot their password, choose Reset password…: they are signed out everywhere and get a temporary password, shown to you only once. Staff passwords are reset by an organisation administrator.

Messages holds students’ questions about problems (each linked to its problem) and your announcements (New announcement). Replies and announcements reach students’ inboxes too.

Wiki

The Wiki holds explanations and reference pages that problems and other pages link to. A page is public or for one organisation. In a statement or a page, type [[ and pick a page to link to it. A problem can list related wiki pages; students see them below the statement.

For organisation administrators

Organisation administrators manage their organisation’s accounts, groups and courses under Administration (in the sidebar or the account menu).

Users

Users – search, filters by role and group, and Export CSV. Select a user to edit their name, reset their password, add them to or move them between groups, disable the account, and see the latest actions on it in a side panel.
Make teacher… lets a user create courses and use the problem archive in the organisation, without administering it. Someone who becomes a group’s teacher gets this role automatically.
A disabled account is signed out everywhere; its submissions and marks stay.

New accounts

Create users creates many accounts at once:

Paste names (“Given Family”, or columns from a spreadsheet) or upload a CSV file (UTF-8 or Windows-1257).
Choose the organisation and, optionally, a group. Without a group, the accounts belong to the organisation only and are enrolled in courses individually.
Check the usernames in the preview: they come from the organisation’s prefix (such as jp1001) or from the names.
On confirmation, every account gets its own temporary password.

Groups and courses

Groups – the organisation’s groups in one table, subgroups under their parent. Select several groups to set their teacher, move them under another group, archive or restore them. New groups creates several at once (for example 1A–1K or 5–8).
A group’s page shows its members, teachers, courses and subgroups. Members can be moved or removed several at a time; you see first how their courses change.
Courses – every course of the organisation by school year. Archive or restore the selected courses.

What changes the whole system (other organisations, system administrators, the servers) is in the system administrator’s guide.

Keyboard shortcuts for staff – the inbox, the progress sheet, the problem picker and the statement editor.
What’s new – what changed in the latest version.

All pages

Every feature in detail:

Courses and teaching

Problem archive

Wiki

Organisation administration