For Instructors

This page is for faculty, workshop facilitators, and anyone running a BIG Ideas cohort on BIG Tools.

Getting your cohort set up

1. Reach out — contact us and let us know the size of your cohort and when you're running. During the student beta, we can help with onboarding and answer logistics questions directly.
2. Share the URL — students sign up themselves at bigtools.dev. No invitation flow needed.
3. Share the docs — point students at Getting Started and For Students before the first session.

Pacing a workshop

A single progression takes 20–45 minutes of focused work. In a 90-minute session, students can comfortably complete one full progression with time to discuss. For a multi-session workshop:

• Session 1 — seed insights and work through NGT + Reframe; discuss the HMWs students promoted
• Session 2 — Filter + Steal; discuss Purpose Profiles and what patterns felt honest vs. forced
• Session 3 — Mixtape + Pitch; share final pitches and critique

If your cohort is running asynchronously, encourage students to complete one progression per week and share the Pitch export with the group.

What to watch for across the cohort

Common failure modes that show up when a group works the same process:

• Over-promotion — students promoting all 5 candidates at every stage. Challenge them: what are you actually choosing?
• Vague Purpose Profiles in Filter — if Filter is passing everything, the Profile is too broad. A good Profile names specific people, specific contexts, specific constraints.
• Generic Mixtape themes — "Design", "Innovation", "Change". Push for a metaphor or a specific image instead.
• Solution-shaped HMWs in Reframe — "How might we build an app that…" is a disguised solution. Re-open and re-run.

Language and RTL

BIG Tools ships with English and Hebrew. The language toggle lives in the app shell and persists across sessions. For Hebrew-language cohorts, both the UI and the tracker (including the Kanban flow) are fully RTL.

If you have students using both languages in the same cohort, each student picks their own preference — the underlying data is identical across languages, so pitches can be shared regardless of which language produced them.

Workshop rhythms worth borrowing

• Group NGT — have students run NGT, then share their 5 candidates with the cohort before promoting. You'll see candidates nobody considered.
• Purpose Profile exchange — before Filter, have pairs of students describe each other's Purpose Profiles. Catches vagueness fast.
• Pitch critique — final session. Students read each other's Pitches blind (no seed, no progression history) and vote on which ones they'd invest 10 minutes of their own time in.

Getting help

If BIG Tools breaks or behaves unexpectedly during a workshop — especially live with students watching — contact us and we'll dig in. Screenshots help. So does noting which stage, which LLM, and what the input was.

The student beta is the right time to tell us what's missing or off. We want to hear from you.