Campfire Session
Explore Flint’s August 2026 updates, including interactive content generation, faster grading and feedback, improved class organization, calendar views, and more.
Teddy Lane, Customer Success Engineer at Flint
In this August Updates Campfire Session, the Flint team demonstrated a range of new features designed to make it easier for educators to create engaging learning experiences, grade and respond to student work, and organize their classes ahead of the new school year. The session focused on Flint’s new interactive content capabilities, improvements to grading and feedback, redesigned activity and chat experiences, and new tools for organizing classes, curriculum, and instructional materials.
Alongside live demonstrations from chemistry and English classrooms, the discussion explored how educators can use these updates in practice—from building custom simulations and reviewing student work to managing due dates, importing curriculum from previous terms, differentiating activities, and giving Sparky deeper context about how a class is taught.
Content covered in this session includes:
Creating custom interactive experiences and simulations directly within Flint activities and chats.
Using an interactive chemistry flame test simulation to help students connect visible observations to atomic-level scientific concepts.
Designing interactive learning experiences that give students enough scaffolding while still leaving room for exploration, experimentation, and discovery.
Iterating on interactive designs with Sparky to adjust layouts, instructions, visuals, interactions, and the amount of information students receive.
Applying Flint’s interactive content capabilities beyond science to subjects including math, history, English, art, and other disciplines.
Reviewing activity analysis to identify individual student strengths, areas for improvement, and opportunities for targeted follow-up.
Viewing rubric-based grades across an entire class and seeing how students performed against individual grading criteria.
Opening individual student sessions to review their conversation history, rubric performance, and overall activity analysis.
Manually adjusting rubric scores when a teacher’s assessment differs from Sparky’s initial evaluation.
Adding specific feedback to individual rubric criteria or providing broader feedback on a student’s overall performance.
Using speech-to-text to provide detailed student feedback more quickly without needing to type every comment manually.
Emailing students when feedback has been added so they know when their teacher has reviewed an assignment and can act on the feedback.
Moving directly between student submissions to make reviewing and grading an entire class more efficient.
Using the new View as Student mode to understand exactly what students see when navigating a Flint class.
Allowing students to review an activity’s rubric before beginning so they understand the skills, knowledge, and criteria they are expected to demonstrate.
Creating and editing rubrics manually within the activity builder or asking Sparky to revise grading categories and criteria.
Using Flint’s redesigned Activities page to see assignments across classes in list, grid, or calendar views.
Filtering activities by class to focus on the assignments associated with a specific course.
Using the calendar view to understand when activities are assigned, upcoming, due, or past due.
Dragging activities directly within the calendar to adjust due dates when a lesson or unit timeline changes.
Exploring activities created by other educators through school and public activity libraries.
Using the Try This Activity experience to explore an existing activity as a student or open it in the activity builder to understand how it was designed.
Organizing chats by the class where they originated so conversations remain connected to the appropriate instructional context.
Renaming and searching chats to make it easier to find previous conversations as the school year progresses.
Using Flint’s document writer, whiteboard, code editor, and equation builder to create different types of instructional materials and student work.
Uploading documents from a device, Google Drive, or Microsoft OneDrive to give Sparky additional context when planning lessons or creating activities.
Uploading images of handwritten work, classroom materials, or student work directly into a Flint chat.
Using speech-to-text and AI-assisted prompt improvement to make conversations with Sparky faster and easier.
Reordering classes in the sidebar based on subject, grade level, semester, or another organizational system.
Using unpublished classes to prepare future courses without making them visible or accessible to students until they are ready.
Publishing a class when teachers are ready for students to begin accessing its activities and resources.
Using folders as filters within a class to quickly view activities associated with a particular unit, book, chapter, or instructional topic.
Connecting school-level curriculum and standards to individual classes so Sparky understands the learning objectives teachers are working toward.
Adding syllabi and unit plans alongside academic standards to give Sparky more detailed context about what is being taught and when.
Importing curriculum and activities from previous terms so educators can reuse successful materials from an earlier school year.
Adding Class Context to explain a teacher’s instructional style, pedagogical approach, student needs, and other information Sparky should consider when supporting the class.
Thinking about Class Context similarly to the information a teacher might give a substitute teacher, teaching assistant, or co-teacher before they step into the classroom.
Reviewing student profiles to see learning patterns, completed activities, sessions, chats, and broader areas for improvement across classes.
Searching student chats and filtering conversations within a class to more easily review how students have been using Flint.
Answering educator questions about managing multiple sections of the same course when assignments are shared but due dates differ.
Using private activities and duplicated assignments as a temporary workflow for assigning different due dates to separate sections of students.
Differentiating activities for individual students by duplicating an activity, making it private, and sharing it only with selected students.
Discussing opportunities for future improvements, including more flexible class sections and teacher-created notes for individual students.
Find the presentation slides here.
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00:00 Introduction
Teddy Lane welcomes educators to Flint’s August Updates Campfire and introduces the session’s focus on new features released ahead of the school year.
He previews updates around richer content generation, faster grading and feedback, and improvements to classes, chats, and activities.
Teddy also encourages educators to share questions and feedback throughout the session as they explore the new workflows.
02:16 Icebreaking news
Teddy invites attendees to share the systems and habits they use to stay organized during the school year.
Drawing from his own teaching experience, he describes using separate folders to organize collected, ungraded, and graded student work, while educators share approaches involving task-management tools, AI assistants, email filtering, walking, and speech-to-text.
The conversation introduces one of the session’s broader themes: helping educators better organize the many activities, conversations, and resources they manage throughout the year.
07:56 Better content generation
Teddy introduces Flint’s new experimental interactive content capabilities using a chemistry flame test.
He compares several existing online simulations and highlights common limitations, including complex interfaces, limited customization, and the additional scaffolding teachers often need to create themselves.
The walkthrough then moves into Flint, where students can drag different elements into a flame, observe changes in color, and connect those observations to electron behavior and the visible light spectrum.
Teddy shows how Sparky can pair the interactive with questions and guidance that encourage students to explore patterns and explain their thinking.
He then opens the activity builder to show how the simulation was refined through multiple iterations, adjusting the layout, interactions, visuals, and amount of scaffolding.
Teddy emphasizes that teachers can use the same approach to build customized interactive experiences across science, math, history, English, art, and other subjects.
20:42 Speed grading in Flint
Teddy shifts to a ninth-grade English class to demonstrate improvements to grading and student feedback.
Using an Animal Farm activity, he shows how teachers can review class performance, student strengths, areas for improvement, rubric scores, and suggested follow-up activities.
Teachers can open individual student sessions, review the conversation, adjust Sparky’s suggested rubric scores, and leave feedback tied to specific areas of performance.
Teddy demonstrates speech-to-text feedback as a faster way to provide detailed comments and shows how teachers can email students once feedback is ready.
He also introduces View as Student, allowing teachers to see exactly what learners experience inside a class.
Students can review an activity rubric before beginning their work, helping them understand the criteria they are expected to demonstrate.
28:29 Improved class pages, calendar view, and more!
Teddy walks through a range of updates designed to make Activities, Chats, and Classes easier to organize.
The redesigned Activities page now offers list, grid, and calendar views, allowing teachers and students to see assignments across classes and understand what is upcoming, due, or overdue.
Teachers can filter the calendar by class and drag activities to new dates when lesson timelines change.
Teddy also demonstrates Flint’s school and public activity libraries, where educators can try activities created by others or open them in the builder to see how they were designed.
The walkthrough then moves to Chats, including tools for creating documents, whiteboards, code, equations, slides, and other materials, as well as uploading files and images and using speech-to-text.
Chats are now more clearly connected to their classes and can be renamed and searched as the school year progresses.
Teachers can also reorder classes in the sidebar, keep future classes unpublished until students need access, and use folders as filters for quickly viewing activities within a particular unit or topic.
Teddy concludes by showing how teachers can connect standards, syllabi, and unit plans to a class, import materials from previous terms, and use Class Context to tell Sparky about their teaching style, students, and instructional priorities.
52:08 Q&A
The Q&A focuses on managing multiple class sections, different due dates, and differentiated student needs.
An educator asks how to reuse the same assignment across several sections while giving each group a different due date.
Because Flint does not yet have a dedicated section-management workflow, Teddy demonstrates a workaround using duplicated private activities shared with specific groups of students, with separate due dates managed through the calendar.
The discussion also covers individual student notes and profiles. Teddy shows how educators can review a student’s classes, activities, sessions, chats, and broader learning patterns.
He also demonstrates searching student chats and explains how private duplicated activities can be used to differentiate assignments for individual learners.
The session concludes with an invitation for educators to continue sharing feedback and feature requests as they use the new updates.
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