Write a tutorial

A tutorial is a lesson made into a video: a line you play on the board, what you say about each position, and what you draw on it.

The Tutorial Studio opens on a phone too, in a layout built for it. A long, many-part tutorial is still easiest to write on a wide screen, where the map of its parts, the board and the open part all sit in view together — but fixing a comment or adding one part no longer has to wait for one.

Start one

Open the Teach tab. Under Tutorials:

New tutorial — give it a Tutorial title and press Create;
Saved tutorials — reopen one you have saved;
Import from a file — open a tutorial prepared outside the app.

Two words: beat and part

A beat is one moment: a position, a sentence you say about it, and what is drawn while you say it. Every move you play on the board makes the next beat — and one position may hold several beats, when you want to say two things about it and draw something different for each.

A part is one line on one starting position. The video walks each part from its first beat to its last, and then the next part, so a part never branches: everything in it is shown.

The rule that saves the most work: play the moves on the board, and let a new part begin only when the story jumps to another position or to a second line. A part for every move is ten times the work, and the video shows ten boards instead of one story.

Write a demonstration

Play the line on the board.
In the Flow tab every beat is a card. Click one and type into Comment for current move.

A sentence belongs to its beat and is read before the move that leaves it: the video shows the position, says what you wrote about it, and then the next move is played. Something to say „after a move" is the sentence of the next beat.

To say a second thing about the same position, press Add a sentence here under the open sentence. The new sentence starts with the marks of the one before it, so you only change what should change — an arrow added, a square taken away — and the video shows the two one after the other, each with its own marks, before the move is played. Where a position has more than one sentence, each has Remove this sentence, and Undo brings it back.

The Tree tab shows the same line as a tree, and the PGN tab shows the part as text — and takes text in: paste an annotated game with its comments, arrows and coloured squares, and press Apply. The small icon on a beat's card, Delete this move, takes back the move that arrived there, with everything after it.

Draw on the board

The bar under the board has Arrow, Square, the colours, and Clear marks.

an arrow is two clicks, from and to; the same two clicks remove it;
a square is one click; another click removes it;
moving to another beat turns drawing off, so your first click there moves a piece again.

A tutorial shows; an exercise asks

Every part of a tutorial shows: a position, a line, and what you say and draw on it. A tutorial is made for its video, and a student is sent the video. If you want a student to find a move themselves, make that position an exercise — it can go into the same homework as the video.

Show a second line from the same position

Your demonstration goes one way and you want to show another move from the middle of it. Go back to that beat and play the other move on the board. The part you were in stays exactly as it was, and a new part begins right after it, on that position, with your move as its line — you are standing on it, ready to go on. In the video it comes after the first line, as „Back to the position after …".

A line that arrives with side lines in it — pasted into the PGN tab, brought over from the Analysis Studio, or imported from a file — is made into parts the same way: up to the position where the lines part, then each side line, then the original line going on. Nothing in it is lost, and nothing in it is hidden from the video.

To cut a part in two where you stand, press the branching icon on the beat's card in Flow, Insert a line here. The part becomes three: up to this beat, a new line from here, and the original continuation.

The parts, as a map

Tutorial contents lists the parts in the order the video plays them. Each row says the part's number and how it opens — new board, continues, or back to after a move — then its name and its moves on one line. On the left, a line joins the parts: solid where a part continues the one before it, dashed where it goes back to a position shown earlier. Every line ends in an arrowhead at the part it leads to, and a dashed line leaves the very move the part goes back to — so three parts that answer one move all come out of that move. A new board is drawn as a square, every other part as a circle. The part you are writing has a border, a ring round its marker and the words you are here.

On a wide window the map has a column of its own, left of the board; on a smaller one it sits above the open part. Above Flow, the open part says where it stands — its number, how it opens, and a link to the part it comes from. In Flow, a beat that a later part goes back to says so on its card, and a click opens that part.

The Tree tab draws the open part together with every part joined to it, as one tree: the parts that leave a move are that move's variations, in the order the video plays them. Right-click such a move (on a phone, press and hold a row of Tutorial contents) and choose Move variation earlier or Move variation later: the part moves together with every part that hangs from it, and the map and the video follow.

Beside the open part's name are Rename, Move up, Move down, Clone part and Delete part. Moving a part can change how it opens: a part moved above the one it goes back to becomes a new board.

Start the next example

New demonstration asks Where does it start?: From here carries on from where the open part's line ends, and the board in the video does not reload; New board starts from the opening position. To set up any other position, use Position setup, the sliders icon at the top.

Name it and say its language

The tutorial's name is at the top of the window: click it and type. Under it are its language and its labels, and Details…, which opens Labels — which let you find a tutorial later — and Language. The language decides which voice narrates the video, and moves in your sentences are spoken in that language. The same sheet has Translate…, which makes a copy of the saved tutorial in another language — see Turn a tutorial into a video.

Text you have not applied

Text typed in the PGN tab belongs to the open part until you press Apply. While it is waiting, the studio will not open another part over it — not by a move that would start a new part, a click on another row, or Undo (Ctrl+Z) — and says so. Press Apply, or Discard to throw the text away.

Check it, then save it

A tutorial is made for its video. To see how the video will look, open Export video and press its Preview button. Each part is drawn from the side its board faces in the studio; the flip turns every part, and Turn this part (White at the bottom now) on a part's own row turns that one alone.

Save tutorial saves once, at the end. Every later press updates the same tutorial rather than making a new one. A tutorial needs a title.

Changed your mind?

Undo (Ctrl+Z) and Redo (Ctrl+Y) are the two arrows at the top. The studio remembers your last hundred changes for as long as it is open. A sentence typed without a pause is one change, not one per letter, and Ctrl+Z works with the cursor in a text field too — except over text in the PGN tab you have not applied, where it undoes your typing instead.
Discard changes, beside them, goes back to the version you last saved — and is itself one undo away.
Work in progress is kept on this computer. Open a saved tutorial that has unsaved changes here, and the studio asks: Continue with my changes or Open the saved version. Neither loses anything while the studio is open.
Start a new tutorial while an unfinished one is waiting, and it asks about that one by name — You have an unfinished tutorial. Choosing a new one there deletes the unfinished one.