SCALE user guide

Challenges and decisions

The prompt-and-response workflow at the center of each SCALE round.

Challenge

A challenge is a round of the simulation. It contains the situation, description, student-visible variables, opening time, decision deadline, processing preferences, and feedback-release rules.

Common statuses include scheduled, open, closed, calculating, completed, and released.

Decision

A decision is one student's response to one challenge. The questions are generated from the classroom's active decision-variable definitions.

A student normally submits once. After submission—or once the challenge closes—the decision is locked unless the instructor explicitly resets it.

Shared context, individual consequences

Every student sees the same challenge context, but their profile and decision can lead to a different result. This makes comparison useful: the class can discuss why a strategy worked under one set of constraints and not another.

Visibility

Students cannot see outcome details, results, or instructor-only debrief content before release. Other students' raw decisions remain private unless the instructor shares them separately.