Running Live Rooms

Before class

1. On your laptop, open rooms.awesomeville.ca/console.html.
2. Enter your licence key (AV-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX) once. This device remembers it. Students never need it.
3. Choose the pace. Together: you click Next and every phone moves. Team pace: each team clicks Next when ready, and your Next pushes everyone. Timed: each step has a clock and advances itself.
4. Decide on Idea Storm. It opens the Build step with a shared sticky-note board, and the Blueprint unlocks after five ideas or when the team taps "We have enough". Turn it off for a short session.
5. Pick how results will show. Your score, peer stars or both give you a podium and a leaderboard. Celebration (no ranking) gives you none: each team sees only its own feedback, badges and awards, and the projector shows a celebration board with every team on it. Good for younger groups and first sessions. You still see every score on the console and in the CSV.
6. Choose an Aha! lens if you want the closing reflection to point one way: teamwork, creativity, entrepreneurship, resilience or sustainability. Random (the default) uses the whole deck.
7. Running on Zoom or Teams? Flip on Remote session. See the Zoom section below.
8. Press Host a game. You get a six-letter room code.

The lobby keeps a short Before you start checklist: projector view open, teams formed, scoring mode chosen, pace chosen, Idea Storm decided, 45 to 60 minutes available. The first two tick themselves; the rest are yours, and they tick when you touch the setting. Under it, one line sums up every setting for the session.

The console shows only the controls for the step you are on. Anything else (Next team up before the pitches, the print button before Results, and so on) sits under More controls at the bottom of the left rail. Nothing has gone away.

Putting the projector view up

1. On the projector or big screen, open rooms.awesomeville.ca/screen.html and enter the room code, or use the "Open projector view" button on the console.
2. It shows the code, a QR, the join link, the current step, the timer and team status. Later it shows the pitch slides and the leaderboard.
3. Press D on the projector keyboard for dark mode. Handy in a bright room with a weak projector.
4. The projector only ever receives public information. It never shows your notes or unpublished scores.

The lobby

1. Tell the room: "Scan the screen or go to rooms.awesomeville.ca and type the code. First name or nickname only."
2. Watch names arrive on the console. Nudge anyone who hasn't joined.
3. Teams: let students pick a team and name it, or press Auto-assign for teams of four or five. You can shuffle, move a student, or remove a player from the console.
4. Remove any empty teams. Empty teams are never dealt or scored, but removing them keeps the projector tidy.
5. Late joiners appear in an alert bar at the top of the console. Place them in one tap. Their team is dealt on placement.
6. When everyone is in, press Deal. Every team gets its own town, opportunities and bylaw.

Running the steps

The console walks the room through cards, build, wildcard, pitch and results. Inside that, the seven steps of the game run in order: Explore, Ideate, Build, Reveal your Wildcard, Prepare your pitch, Pitch, Reflect. For each step you get:

• A what-to-say prompt. Read it out or use your own words.
• A timer with a sensible default. Adjust it before you start the step.
• A Do-list for you, and a "?" on every phone so students can read what to do without asking.

When the timer ends, Time's up flashes on every phone and on the projector. Teams can raise a hand from their phone if they need you. You'll see each team's Blueprint fill in live with an "edited a moment ago" stamp, so you can tell who's moving and who's stuck.

The wildcard moment

1. Give a heads-up: "In one minute something is going to change in your town."
2. Press Wildcard. That unlocks every team's card, face down. Each team taps its own card to flip it, so the reveal happens at their table, not yours. Your tiles say who has not flipped yet.
3. Give them the timer to adapt. The best learning happens here, so don't rush it.

Pitches

1. Move to the Pitch step. Teams see the rubric on their phones before anyone speaks.
2. Press Next team up. That team's seven pitch slides go on the projector, built from their Blueprint. They drive from their phone.
3. Want a fixed clock? Turn on Rocket pitch. Slides advance on a set timer (10 to 120 seconds per slide) and nobody can skip ahead.
4. While a team pitches, every other student gives 1 to 5 stars and one badge: Most creative, Most doable, Best pivot, Made me laugh, or I would buy it.
5. Each team also casts one Audience Choice vote.
6. Press Next team up again until everyone has gone.

Scoring, then Publish

1. Score each team on the six rubric criteria (Community insight, Customer & problem, Value proposition, Business thinking, Adaptability, Pitch & teamwork), 1 to 4 each, out of 24, with a feedback note and any awards. Do this during or after the pitches. Nobody sees it yet.
2. Pick the ranking: your score, peer stars, both, or Celebration (no ranking). With both, stars weigh the same as your marks. You can change it at Results too.
3. Press Publish. Each team sees their own score, feedback and awards. In a ranked mode the leaderboard goes up on the projector and on every phone, and teams see only totals for the other teams, never your notes. In Celebration mode nobody sees anyone else's numbers: phones show "What the room said about you" and the projector shows the celebration board.
4. While teams talk through their Aha! card, each student can write a short personal reflection. They land in a Reflections panel on your Results screen as they arrive, with name, team and time. Only you see them. They are optional; not every student will write one.

Export

• Download CSV gives you one row per team with marks, stars, votes and awards for the gradebook, then the reflections underneath, one row per student who wrote one.
• Print report gives you the session on paper: Blueprints, scores, and the reflections at the end.
• Do this before you leave. The room deletes itself 24 hours after the last activity, and nothing is stored anywhere else.
• Want it gone now? End session now (under More controls, and on the Results screen) deletes the room on the spot. Every phone and the projector leave with a "session ended" message, and the code stops working. It asks twice, because it also deletes the CSV you have not downloaded yet.

Things that go wrong, and the fix

• A phone dropped or died. Reopen the link on the same phone, or scan the QR again. Their team and their work are restored.
• The code doesn't fit the projector. It auto-fits from a small laptop to a 4K screen. If it looks wrong, refresh the projector page.
• Someone asks for the key. They don't need it. The key lives only on the host laptop. Students join with the room code.
• You lost your key. Email hello@awesomeville.ca from the address you bought with.
• You refreshed the console by accident. It resumes the game where you left it.
• A student needs to be removed. Remove them from the console. Their phone disconnects and can't quietly rejoin. If they should come back, they reload the join page and join again.
• A team goes quiet. They've usually skipped straight to the solution. Send them back to the problem: who is this actually for?

Accessibility

• Every screen has an A button that opens the display panel: light, dark or follow-device theme, three text sizes, easier reading, high contrast, and reduce motion.
• Read-aloud puts a speaker button on every card so a student can hear their town and opportunities.
• Preferences stay on that device, so a student who sets it once is set for next time.
• The console and projector also have a one-tap dark-mode toggle. Press D on the projector.

Zoom and Teams

1. Flip on Remote session in the lobby. The projector view drops the QR and shows the join link large, so you can share that screen.
2. Press Copy join message and paste it into the meeting chat. It has the link and the code.
3. After teams form, press Copy team list for breakouts and paste it into breakout pre-assignment. Use one breakout room per team, named the same.
4. Timer defaults add two minutes per step, because everything is slower on a call.
5. Everything else is unchanged. Steps, timers, Time's up and "now pitching" reach each student's own screen, even inside a breakout room.

Shorter and longer versions

45 minutes: turn off Idea Storm, use Timed pace, and cap pitches with Rocket pitch at 20 seconds a slide.
90 minutes: keep Idea Storm on, run Team pace for Build, and give each team a minute of questions after their pitch before the next team is up.

Questions or something that didn't work? Email me at hello@awesomeville.ca. I read every one.