Question blocks
Each section can hold question blocks alongside text, images, spelling lists and VAKT activities. Pick a type from the Add question menu; every type is colour-coded so it's easy to scan the lesson at a glance. The types, their shape, and their colours live in one place, packages/core/src/questions.js, so the editor and both exporters stay in sync.
| Type | Colour | What it captures |
|---|---|---|
| Number answer | purple | A single numeric answer, with an optional extendable list of solution steps. |
| Single answer | green | A list of options with exactly one correct choice. |
| Multiple answers | amber | Several accepted answers; any one of them is right. |
| Suggested answers | amber, italic | Several suggested answers. The key is a guide; other answers can be right. |
| Paraphrase | brown | Restate the passage in their own words. No stored answer. |
| Open ended | pink | A free written response. |
| Would you rather | grape | A "Would you rather… or…?" choice. Opinion only, so no stored answer. |
| Background knowledge | blue | A prompt plus the prior knowledge a student needs to answer it. |
Multiple answers is amber rather than the burnt orange it used to be: it would otherwise sit too close to Paraphrase's brown, and in a printed lesson a question's marking is nearly all it has to go on.
The two amber types
Multiple answers and Suggested answers are one family, the semi-open questions, and they share the amber deliberately. What they disagree about is what the answer list means:
- Multiple answers: the list is the complete accepted set. In a lesson written to the authoring standard, it is every item of a list the passage states outright, and the prompt quotes that sentence with the list blanked out.
- Suggested answers: the list is a suggestion. The question is bounded by the topic ("Give a synonym for GRATITUDE"), and a student who answers something else that fits is also right.
Since nothing in a printed lesson names a question's type, two types sharing a colour would be two types a reader cannot tell apart, so Suggested answers prints in italic, in the body and in the footer legend alike. That mark is load-bearing: it is what tells whoever is marking the lesson that this one answer key is advisory. It exists because the palette has no spare colour that reads as orange without colliding with Paraphrase's brown.
The editor doesn't need the italic (every question there carries a type badge), so the two are told apart by the badge and by the help text under the answer rows.
Would you rather
A Would you rather question offers the speller a choice between two options and asks which they would pick: "Would you rather watch an opera or a movie?". It is opinion, not comprehension, so like Paraphrase and Open ended it stores no answer. It prints in grape; if the colour is ever in doubt on paper, the prompt disambiguates itself, since every question of the type starts "Would you rather". The footer legend names it W.Y.R., the abbreviation the lessons this type comes from use.
In the editor each question also shows its position within its section, Q7, next to the type badge. A standard section holds fifteen of them, and the type badge alone doesn't distinguish one from the next, so the number is what makes a question findable again after you've scrolled away from it (see Navigating large lessons). It's editor-only chrome: nothing is written into the document or the export.
A question prints as its prompt in the colour of its type, followed by its answer in black on the same line: nothing is labelled or bracketed, so the colour, plus the italic on Suggested answers, is what marks the type. The footer legend on every page names the types the same way (see the export pipeline); Would you rather is the one type the legend abbreviates, to W.Y.R., so the eight-entry line still fits. A question with no recorded answer, and the free-response types (Paraphrase, Open ended and Would you rather), print as the prompt alone.
Number-answer questions can also hold a list of steps, the worked-out stages of solving the problem. Use Add step in the editor to grow the list, and remove any row you don't need; the list starts empty since steps are optional. Steps print as an indented numbered list under the question, and round-trip through both JSON and DOCX import.