Studio Design

Scene Management

7 min readUpdated Oct 24, 2026

Create, rename, reorder, and reorganize scenes so a lesson has a clear learner flow.

Scenes are the backbone of a lesson. Good scene management makes the learner experience feel intentional instead of stitched together.

Opening the scene panel

The scene panel is the Scenes tab of the left panel, and it's what the studio shows when you first open it. It sits beside the canvas, so you keep your work in view while you reorder, rename, or add scenes. If you collapsed the panel to its strip of icons, click the Scenes icon to open it again.

Reading the scene previews

Each scene shows as a live thumbnail — a miniature of the actual scene, so you can recognize it at a glance instead of reading down a list of names. The thumbnail updates as you edit, so what you see in the panel always matches what the learner sees. Your lesson's opening scene does double duty as its preview thumbnail elsewhere in Berdee — see Lesson Previews.

A few things to look for on each thumbnail:

A purple outline marks the scene you are currently editing.
A DRAFT tag means the scene is still empty — you have created it but not added any widgets yet.
An amber warning badge in the top corner means the scene has validation issues that would block publishing. Open Publishing Updates to see and fix them.
Hover a thumbnail to reveal its duplicate and more (rename, duplicate, delete) buttons.

If a scene uses a layout — a shared backdrop applied to it — its thumbnail carries a small layout chip, so you can see at a glance which scenes share a backdrop.

The Layouts tab

Layouts are not in the scene panel — they have their own Layouts tab in the left panel, right next to Scenes. Each layout appears with a caption like "Applied to 4 scenes", and the dashed Add layout button creates a new one with its name ready to type. A layout card's ⋯ menu holds Rename, Apply to scenes…, Duplicate, Convert to scene, and Delete. Full guide: Layouts.

The scene panel stays about the learner flow; the verbs that put a backdrop on a scene still live on the scene's own ⋯ menu (see below).

What you can do in the scene panel

From the scene panel, you can:

Add a new scene with the Add scene button at the bottom of the list. To drop a scene at an exact spot, hover the gap between two scenes and click the + that appears. Once your lesson has a layout, Berdee asks which layout the new scene should use before adding it — see Choosing a layout for a new scene. A new scene starts empty, so once it's added the left panel switches to Lesson Widgets and the Widgets tab flashes, ready for you to search for the first widget. Click Scenes to come back to the list
Give a scene a shared backdrop from its ⋯ menu — Apply layout… opens the layout picker with a live preview, Save as layout copies the scene's widgets and background into a new layout (the scene is untouched), and Convert to layout turns the scene itself into one, removing it from the lesson flow (never offered for the opening scene) — see Layouts
Select a scene to edit by clicking its thumbnail
Rename scenes (double-click the name, or use the thumbnail's more menu — you can also rename the current scene from the top of the properties panel)
Duplicate a scene from its thumbnail. The copy lands right below the original with everything on it — background, widgets, styling, progression, and transition — so it's the quickest way to build a run of similar questions. _Examples: Build a three-question quiz by duplicating a scene, and Make a picture-book story whose pages turn, where every copied page slides in the same way._
Drag scenes up or down to reorder them
Delete scenes that are no longer needed

The result is a flexible structure that can evolve as the lesson becomes clearer.

If duplicating a scene or layout, or saving a scene as a layout, tells you a widget "isn't available right now", it holds a widget that has been paused and can't be copied for the moment — the original keeps working. See When a widget is greyed out.

The Ending section

Below your scenes, the scene panel has a fixed Ending section holding the lesson's closing scenes — the scenes a learner finishes on. Every lesson has at least one, and a new lesson arrives with one already built.

An ending edits like any other scene: click its thumbnail to open it and work on its widgets on the canvas as usual. What it does not do is move. An ending cannot be dragged or reordered; it always stays in the Ending section.

Renaming and deleting depend on how many endings you have. A lesson's last remaining ending cannot be renamed or deleted — a lesson always needs somewhere to finish. Once a lesson has more than one, each becomes renameable and deletable down to the last, so you can label them for what they mean: Mastered, Keep practicing, Ask an adult. Today extra endings arrive through an AI-authored or imported lesson; adding one by hand in the studio is on the way.

Full guide: The Closing Scene

Start with functional scene names

Name scenes by purpose, not by sequence alone.

Stronger names:

Welcome
Watch the Model
Choose the Best Answer
Try Again
Celebrate

Weaker names:

Scene 1
Scene 2
Slide A

Functional names make editing faster later, especially once a lesson has several branches or retries.

Keep sections together in the list

Your scenes are one list, in the order learners meet them. Keep the scenes for each part of the lesson next to each other — instruction first, then practice, then review — so the list reads like the lesson itself. When the scenes in a section should also share a backdrop, apply the same layout to them.

Reorganize as the lesson becomes clearer

It is normal for a lesson to start with a rough sequence and become more structured later.

Dragging a scene up or down is a practical way to improve structure without rebuilding the content. Reordering helps when:

A practice step should happen earlier
A feedback scene needs to sit directly after a challenge
A group of scenes needs to move because the lesson pacing changed

Think of drag and drop as a structural editing tool, not just a cleanup feature.

When to split a scene

Split a scene when it is trying to do too many jobs at once.

Signs that a scene should become two scenes:

It teaches and assesses at the same time
It has too many widgets competing for attention
The learner needs a clear transition to feel progress
Feedback and next steps are getting buried on the same screen

If the learner should feel like they are moving into a new phase, use a new scene.

To split one, add a scene, then select the widgets that belong on it and use Move to Scene in the toolbar: they keep their answers and scoring. _Step by step: Split a crowded scene into two._

When to keep content in one scene

Do not create extra scenes only because the layout changed slightly.

Keep content in one scene when:

The learner is still completing one coherent task
Feedback belongs immediately next to the task
The scene just needs reveal logic instead of a full transition

Sometimes conditional visibility is a better solution than another scene.

More detail: Visibility and Personalization

Deleting scenes thoughtfully

Delete scenes when they no longer serve the flow, but check whether they contain reusable work first.

Before deleting a scene, ask:

Should any widgets move to another scene
Should some shared elements move to a layout — Save as layout on the scene's ⋯ menu captures them before you delete
Is this scene better repurposed as feedback, retry, or extension

Deleting from the Lesson Graph (hover a scene card and choose Delete) shows you first which paths lead into the scene and would break, and which scenes would be left with nowhere to go.

Deleting from the Scenes tab (the thumbnail's ⋯ menu → Delete) happens at once, with no confirmation. Press ⌘Z (Ctrl+Z) straight away to undo it, or, if you've closed the lesson since, bring the scene back from History. _Step by step: Bring back a scene you deleted with History._

A strong scene map for many lessons

This pattern works well for a wide range of classroom lessons:

Opening scene
Instruction scene
Guided practice scene
Independent check scene
Feedback or retry scene
Extension scene
Closing scene

You do not need all seven every time, but this gives you a useful starting structure. The closing scene is always there — it is what finishes the lesson.