Getting Started with Materia

Materia is a platform and ecosystem for creating and sharing interactive study tools and games called widgets. This page is a quick-reference guide to let you hit the ground running with using Materia, regardless of whether you’re a student or instructor.

For Students (Players)

Where do I find widgets?

Your instructor may choose to include Materia widgets in your course in a variety of places: they can be embedded as assignments, as module items, or directly in page content. Materia widgets are designed to help demonstrate course concepts in an engaging, interactive way, or help reinforce prior learning as supplemental material.

Playing Widgets

Depending on how your instructor embedded their Materia widgets, you may be prompted to login to Materia beforehand. Many widgets are embedded in a way that lets Materia and your LMS communicate with one another; in these circumstances, the widget will load immediately already knowing who you are!

Viewing Your Scores

At any time, you can review your prior play history in Materia by logging in and visiting your Profile page. Your Profile provides a chronological history of all of your widget play sessions, and clicking a completed play session lets you review the score screen for that attempt.

Making Your Own Widgets

Students can create their own widgets too! You use Materia widgets as study material, practice, or to share with your friends. Your instructor may choose to task you with authoring a widget as part of a discussion activity or supplemental learning.

Keep in mind, even if your widgets collects scores, you will not be able to see who played your widget. Student-authored widgets are restricted to guest access, which means the data they collect is anonymous.

For Instructors (Authors)

Creating Widgets

We designed Materia widgets to be as simple and straightforward to author as possible. The vat majority of widgets in our catalog can be authored in a manner of minutes. Each widget that’s customizable includes a bespoke “creator” interface that you can use to author the widget to your needs. When you’re ready, select “Save Draft” or “Publish” to save your widget.

Most widgets in the Materia widget catalog contain Player and Creator guides to provide extra guidance on how to use the player and creator interfaces. When available, these are linked in the Catalog page for each widget, and the Creator’s Guide will be available from the action bar of the creator interface.

Assigning and Sharing Widgets

Widgets can be shared in one of three ways:

1. Via the play URL: this is the simplest and most straightforward method. Your students click the link, login to Materia (if they aren’t already), and play. Materia retains students’ play history, but it’s not transmitted anywhere.
2. Via the embed URL: this allows you to embed a Materia widget in a web page, in a manner akin to embedding video content from your favorite video hosting platform. Like the play URL, students will have to authenticate with Materia directly in order to access the widget, and the score is retained in Materia but not sent anywhere else.
3. Via LMS integration: this is the most powerful and popular method for sharing your Materia content. When embedded as a content item in your LMS, Materia leverages the “handshake” between the two systems to perform automatic authentication, and Materia will transmit the score to the gradebook if available. For more information, review the Embedding in Canvas section below.

Collaborating with Others

The Collaboration dialog lets you share access to your widget with other Materia users. For example, you may have multiple instructors teaching a course, or want to grant access to a TA for a semester. Enter the individual’s name or email into the search dialog to bring them up. Once added, you can grant users one of two access levels:

• View Scores: this is effectively read-only access, which allows the user to view score data the widget has collected but they cannot make edits to the widget.
• Full: this makes the user a co-owner of the widget. They have all the same rights you do: they can review score data and edit the widget if desired.

What if I don’t see the person I’m trying to add as a collaborator? The individual must have interacted with Materia at least once in the past in order to be visible in the search dialog. Ask them to login to Materia - for example, by visiting an embedded widget in a course - and they will be visible in the collaboration dialog afterwards.

You can additionally provide an expiration date for users’ permissions. Their access will be invalid following the expiration date that you set. For example, if your TA is graduating the following semester, you can set the expiration date for the end of the semester so you don’t have to worry about revoking their access later.

Viewing Scores and Data

Materia will always store student interaction data for you to review at any time. This is visible in the Student Activity section of a selected widget in My Widgets. Scores are organized by the semester they were collected, and you can review prior semesters by selecting “Show Older Scores” at the bottom.

To review specific scores, select the Individual Scores tab. Here, you can review all the attempts - completed and incomplete - for each student. View the score screen associated with a given play session by selecting the arrow on the right of the Individual Scores table. The “WEB” or “LTI” tag in each row denotes the context the widget was played in: “WEB” indicates the widget was played in standalone context, directly with Materia. “LTI” indicates the widget was played as an embedded content item in an LMS. Play sessions marked “LTI” are eligible for gradebook sync, if the associated activity in the LMS had a related gradebook column.

Embedding in Canvas

Embedding a Materia widget offers two advantages to using them standalone:

1. User authentication is handled automatically, behind the scenes. Students will never see a login prompt to interact with your Materia content.
2. If embedded in a context that is associated with a gradebook, such as an assignment, Materia will send the score to the gradebook for that activity.

To learn more about embedding your widgets in Canvas, visit our Embedding in Canvas page.

Profile and Settings

Your Profile page provides a history of your widget play sessions, regardless of whether they are embedded in an LMS or played standalone. Use the settings page to customize your Materia experience further, such as whether you receive email notifications, your profile picture, and theme selection.