How students sign in

A school student has no email address and no password. Their login code is the whole credential. This is on purpose: asking a seven year old to remember an email and a password is asking for a lesson spent resetting passwords.

The address

Students go to skhillzscript.com/student

Not the home page, and not the same page you sign in on. Write it on the board. If your school uses managed devices, ask whoever manages them to set that as a bookmark or a home page on the class set. It saves five minutes every single lesson.

The code

The code looks like S-ABCD-2345.

• Capitals or lower case both work.
• Dashes or no dashes both work. sabcd2345 gets in.
• Spaces at either end are ignored.

The child types it and presses Start. That is the entire sign-in.

What they see

The system opens with a greeting using their first name, their class shown on the right, and a Finish button. Everything else on the screen is the lesson itself, described in How a lesson works.

Shared devices

This matters and it is worth reading twice.

The code is remembered only for as long as the browser tab is open. Close the tab and the next child gets a clean sign-in screen. That is chosen deliberately: on a shared cart tablet, a credential that survives the session is a credential the next child inherits.

The consequence for you is a classroom routine:

1. At the end of a session, the child presses Finish, or closes the tab.
2. The next child signs in with their own code.

If a child forgets to press Finish and hands the tablet straight over, the next child will be writing under the first child's name. There is no way for the system to know the person holding the stylus changed. Make Finish the last thing they do, the way you would make putting the lid on a marker the last thing they do.

What happens to the work

Practice is scored on the device as the child writes, so a dropped connection does not stop the lesson. The results are sent up to your class records:

• as they practice, a couple of seconds after each burst of work,
• when they press Finish or close the tab,
• and once a minute regardless, as a backstop.

If the network is genuinely down, the work stays on that device and goes up the next time the same child signs in on the same device. This is why a child who practiced on the library laptop during an outage should be sent back to the library laptop rather than a different one.

Signing in on a different device

A student can sign in on any device with their code. When they do, whatever the school already holds for them is pulled down first, so they carry on where they left off rather than starting again.

Where two devices disagree about a letter, the better score wins. A child cannot lose a passed letter by practicing it badly on a different machine.

One message for every failure

If a code does not work, the screen says the same thing regardless of the cause:

That single message covers a mistyped code, a student who has been withdrawn, and a school whose license has lapsed. It is deliberately uninformative, because a message that told the difference would tell somebody guessing codes which ones exist.

For what to actually do about it, see When something goes wrong.