Quest Ladder
TeachFORGE.ai
Quest Ladder / Hints
Hints: styles, unlock time and deductions
Help a learner who is stuck without simply giving them the answer.
A hint should move them, not finish for them.
Progressive hints
Hints are shown during the attempt, in order, and each is its own step in the editor — Hint 2 of 3, with Add another hint beside it. A learner chooses to open one; they are not shown automatically.
The progression is the point. Hint one should redirect attention, hint two should name the method, and only the last should come close to the working. Three hints that each give a third of the answer teach less than three that each ask a better question.
The six styles
Hint style says how direct this hint is, which shapes what the AI drafts on the assisted lanes and tells you at a glance what kind of help you have written.
| Style | Sounds like |
|---|---|
| Conceptual | A nudge towards the idea. What stays constant here? |
| Procedural | The steps of the method, without the numbers. |
| Worked example | The same method on a different problem. |
| Visual | A picture, a diagram, a way of seeing it. |
| Simplification | The same question with easier numbers. |
| Analogy | Something familiar that behaves the same way. |
A good ladder of hints usually moves down this table rather than staying in one row.
Unlock time and deduction
Each hint has an Unlock after (seconds) and a Mark deduction. Both are set in one place — Hint timing defaults in shared settings — and shown read-only on the hint step itself, so they cannot be set twice and disagree.
If a hint step says there is no shared timing row for it, the hint exists but its timing does not. Add the row under Hint timing defaults, or the hint will not behave as you expect.
An unlock delay is worth setting. Without one a learner can open every hint before reading the question, and the attempt tells you nothing.
What the deduction really does
A deduction subtracts from the final mark, and it also reaches further than the mark: the mastery gate can require at least one attempt without hints before it counts a topic as learned, and the analytics track a hint rate per learner.
So the deduction is not only a punishment, it is a signal. Set it small enough that a stuck learner still takes the help — a hint nobody opens has taught nobody anything — and let the mastery gate handle the question of whether they can do it unaided.