Lessons and Scenes
Understand the core building blocks of Berdee — lessons, scenes, layouts, and the opening and closing scenes — and how they fit together in real lesson design.
These concepts make the rest of Berdee easier to understand.
Lesson
A lesson is the full learning experience you are building. Older parts of Berdee may still call it a "material."
A lesson can include:
- Multiple scenes
- Multiple interaction types
- Grading rules
- Reusable widgets
- Shared visual structure
- Variables and logic that shape the learner experience
Real-world examples of a lesson:
- A warm-up activity
- A station rotation task
- A phonics mini-lesson
- A science check for understanding
- A student-paced review activity
Scene
A scene is a single learner-facing screen inside a lesson.
Scenes are useful when you want to:
- Break a lesson into manageable steps
- Separate instruction from practice
- Branch to different outcomes
- Pace an experience so learners are not overloaded
Common scene roles:
- Introduction
- Worked example
- Question
- Hint
- Feedback
- Celebration
- Retry
If a learner should feel like they have moved to the next step, that is usually a new scene.
Your scenes sit in one list in the scene panel, in lesson order. Keep the scenes for each part of the lesson — instruction, practice, review — next to each other, and drag them up or down when the pacing changes.
Going back to a scene
Learners keep their answers when they go back. If a learner answers a question, moves on, and then returns — with a Back button, a Hint scene that leads back, or any other path — they find their answer as they left it, whether or not it has been submitted yet. They can keep working from there: a word search keeps the words already found (and stays revealed if they pressed Reveal answers), a scored spin wheel keeps its spins used and its running total, and a long answer keeps the attempts it has used, so Max Spins and Max Attempts still hold. A long answer only counts once the learner presses Submit on it, so text they typed but never submitted is not kept.
To give learners a clean slate instead, wire a Try Again Button to the Reset answers action. Reset clears the answers on screen along with the recorded ones — so what the learner sees is always what a submit would grade. Answers that were already submitted stay as they are; see Events, actions, and conditions.
Layout
A layout is a shared backdrop that lives at the lesson level, in its own Layouts tab beside your scenes. Build one, apply it to any scenes that should share it, and its widgets and background appear behind each of those scenes. Layouts are live-linked: edit the layout once and every scene using it updates. Layouts are useful for anything you want to reuse consistently, such as:
- Page backgrounds
- Instructions that repeat across a sequence
- Branding
- Decorative layout elements
- Shared score or timer displays
A practical example
Suppose you are building a three-part vocabulary activity:
- All three practice scenes should use the same background
- Each scene should show the same directions at the top
- The score should remain visible throughout the activity
Put that shared structure on a layout and apply it to the three practice scenes. The individual scene-specific prompts and questions belong on the scenes themselves.
Dedicated guide: Layouts
Opening scene
The opening scene is the scene learners start on when the lesson begins.
This is usually where you:
- Welcome learners
- Explain the task
- Provide a first prompt
- Or set up the first decision they need to make
Even in more complex branching lessons, the opening scene should make the first step obvious.
Closing scene
The closing scene is the opening scene's counterpart: the scene learners finish on. Every lesson has at least one, and every new lesson is created with both.
Reaching a closing scene is what finishes the lesson. At that moment the attempt is recorded as complete and the learner's answers are locked — there is no separate "finish" button for a student to remember to press. A learner can play the lesson again later, and that counts as a new attempt rather than changing the first one.
A new lesson's closing scene already carries an ending you can use as-is: a headline, the learner's score, and a celebration a moment after they arrive. It is built from ordinary widgets, so rewrite the headline, restyle it, or replace it entirely.
Two rules keep the ending trustworthy: a closing scene holds no questions and no answer-checking (the lesson is already graded by the time the learner lands there), and nothing leads out of it. The Lesson Graph will not draw a path out of an ending, and publish validation warns you if either rule is broken somewhere else.
A lesson can have several closing scenes when it has several outcomes — Mastered, Needs more practice, Ask an adult — each reached by its own path. Extra endings come from AI-authored and imported lessons today; adding one by hand in the studio is on the way.
Dedicated guide: The Closing Scene
Media library
The media library holds the images, audio, video, and documents you upload, generate, or import from stock. Everything you add is kept there, so you can reuse a file across scenes and lessons without uploading it again.
More detail: Organize and Use the Media Library
How these concepts work together
The cleanest mental model looks like this:
- A lesson is the whole learning experience.
- A scene is one step in that lesson — the first is the opening scene, and the lesson finishes on a closing scene.
- A layout is a shared backdrop, applied to the scenes that should share it.
- The media library keeps your files in one place so you can reuse them and build faster.
Once this structure feels natural, the rest of the platform becomes much easier to use well.
Putting lessons in front of learners
Once a lesson is built and ready, you assign it to students from a classroom. See Assigning Lessons to Students for the bulk and per-student assignment flows.