Prepare material: your library and positions from a book

Everything you will put in front of a student — positions, tutorials, tasks — is prepared on your own board first, and kept where you can find it again.

Your own board, without a student

Preparation is on the Teach tab, a screen of its own with nobody else on it: Your board, your library, no student. The board takes what the window has left, with the move tree, the comment and the engine's lines beside it; on a phone those three are tabs under the board.

The bar holds what you put on the board and what you keep. Library opens your library beside the board — a tutorial part arrives with its line, a saved analysis with its whole tree, an exercise or a position as the position alone — and a tutorial is then walked part by part from the bar, with Previous part and Next part. Board has Set up position…, Paste FEN…, Import PGN… and Starting position.

Save as… keeps what is on the board: Position puts the position in front of you in your library, Analysis the whole tree with its comments and marks, Exercise… opens the exercise sheet on it, and PGN hands you the text. Open in Analysis carries the tree over to the Analyse tab. On a phone held upright both lists are behind More.

Under the board you mark it: Arrow and Square, in five colours, with Undo and Clear marks.

Record at your own board

Record in the bar records your voice together with everything you do on the board: moves, steps through a line, positions you load, and the arrows and squares you draw. It is for an adult alone: the app asks the server first, and says why when you may not. While it runs the bar itself shows the time, with Pause, Stop and save and Discard, and the board stays the size it was; near the limit of one recording it counts the seconds left, and at the limit it stops by itself and keeps what you said. Save as… waits until the recording is over. You cannot leave Preparation while recording — Stop or discard the recording first.

Stop asks for a title and sends the recording to the server; until the server has it, it stays on this device, and Try again sends it once more. The recording is then under Recordings on Home. In the player, Share… (behind ⋮ on a phone) chooses which of your students may watch it — a group ticks its members — and unticking everybody takes it back. A student watches it in the app and, once you have exported a video, downloads it with Download video; until then they read No video yet — ask your trainer. A recording stops being theirs to watch if they stop being your student.

Your words as text

A recording you made in Preparation can be turned into text — only yours, and only one made in Preparation. In its player the sentences stand beside the board; on a phone held upright they open from an icon beside the playback speed, and the two actions stand behind a ⋮ above the sentences. With nothing there yet it says No transcript yet. and offers Transcribe…: choose the language you spoke (Serbian comes back in Latin letters) and the sound is sent to a speech service, Groq, to be heard. It takes a few seconds, and meanwhile the button reads Transcribing…

Every sentence carries the time it was said; a tap on one moves the player there, and the sentence being said is marked with ▶. The pencil opens a sentence to correct what the service heard wrong — the time never changes, and what it heard stays written under a corrected sentence. Transcribe again… hears the recording once more, and asks first, because it replaces the text and your corrections.

A tutorial from a recording

Make a tutorial — above the sentences in the player (behind ⋮ on a phone), or on the recording's card in the Library under Recordings — makes an ordinary tutorial of it and opens it in the Tutorial Studio. The app cuts it the way you taught:

a new part begins where you jumped to another position, or loaded one;
each sentence goes on the position standing when you finished saying it, so „now the knight goes to f3" lands on the move it names;
a sentence during which you played a move or drew something is cut there: what you said before stays on the board as it was, and the arrow, the square or the move comes with the part of the sentence you drew it in — from the comma before it, or from the very word if that was more than six seconds earlier;
a move you played without a word is still a step, so the line can be seen; a position you only passed through on the way somewhere else is not.

Your voice is copied into the tutorial, and the recording stays exactly as it was. Export the tutorial's video and your own voice is offered as its sound, each step appearing when you said it. Correcting a word in the tutorial keeps your voice; changing a move, moving a part, or adding or removing a sentence moves the steps out from under it, and the export then says so and offers a synthesised voice instead.

A recording with no transcript can still become a tutorial — its moves, its marks and your voice, with no words: the app asks first, and Make it without words goes ahead.

Your saved positions

Saved positions are in the Library on Teach, under the Positions chip, together with positions from a book — a book's positions carry their source, and under Positions and Exercises the list narrows to one book (All sources shows them all). A position keeps the labels you gave it when you saved it, and the list filters by them. The search reads the title, the labels, the book and the diagram's number. With nothing there yet it says Nothing here yet.

From that list a position can go straight to work: Add to tutorial, or Make exercise — a position from a book becomes the exercise itself and keeps its book and page. An exercise can be tried with Solve, and, once you have a student, sent with Assign to student and a Deadline.

Diagrams out of a chess book

The scanner reads a PDF whose diagrams are set in a chess font — the way chess books are typeset. It is not a camera: the screen says so itself, that diagrams are read from text rather than from images. A photograph of a page, or a PDF made by scanning one, will not do.

The scanner is reached from the Teach tab with Scan a book.
Select PDF, then the pages: From page and To page. If the book keeps its answers at the back, the pages holding them go in Solutions from and Solutions to.
Press Scan and wait while the pages are read — at most 40 pages per pass.
Every diagram it finds is shown for you to confirm, each marked White to move or Black to move. Where the book does not say, Suggest sides with the engine proposes the side for every board, and the move where it finds one; Stop ends that early. A proposal changes nothing until you take it, with Set side or Set side and answer. Until the side is decided, the engine would work on the wrong side.
Save keeps the ones you confirmed. A position saved with its side still in doubt asks Who is to move? the first time you use it.

The document itself is not kept on the server: you confirm each position, and what is saved is the position.

What can go wrong

No diagrams read. or There are no diagrams we can read on those pages. — the page range holds no diagrams the scanner can read.
The diagrams in this book use a font we cannot read yet. — the book is typeset in a chess font the scanner does not know. Nothing is wrong with the file.
Cannot read the selected file. — the PDF cannot be opened at all.
A side to move that cannot be right — the screen refuses it: That side cannot be to move in this position.