Student guide

This workspace simulates the part of a real systems analysis project where you work out what a system actually needs to do, by talking to the people who will use it. Your team has been given a case: an organisation with a problem, a set of people connected to it, and documents describing how things currently work. Nobody will hand you a requirements list. You have to interview people and work it out.

The people you interview are AI simulations configured by your instructor. They are not real people, and they are not a search engine. Each one knows only what their role would plausibly know. They have opinions, blind spots, and sometimes beliefs that are simply wrong. Part of the exercise is noticing when two people tell you different things.

You need one thing: the access code your instructor gave you. There is no password and no registration step.

1. Go to the student sign-in page and enter your code in the Access code box.
2. Codes look like MAPLE-7284: a word, a hyphen, and four digits. Capitalization does not matter: the box capitalizes as you type and ignores characters that cannot appear in a code.
3. Press Open my workspace.

Your session lasts 30 days, so on your own machine you will usually stay signed in for the length of the project. Use Sign out in the header when you are on a shared computer.

The header always shows your case, your class, your team and your name. Four links sit beside it.

A Stakeholders column lists everyone your team knows about. People you can interview are clickable. People marked Not yet available are known to exist but cannot be interviewed yet.

If your instructor has paused interviewing, a banner says so. Transcripts and documents stay readable while it is paused.

1. Click a person on the workspace page or in the stakeholder column.
2. Read their role and background at the top. It tells you what they are likely to know about.
3. Type your question in the box and press Send. Enter sends; Shift and Enter together add a new line.
4. Their reply appears in the transcript, and is added to the same transcript your teammates see.

Questions are limited to 4,000 characters, which is far more than you should need. A counter under the box shows how much you have used. Ask one thing at a time: a question with five parts usually gets one part answered well and four answered vaguely.

Use the search box above the transcript to find something said earlier. Refresh pulls in anything your teammates have asked in the last few moments.

Only one question per person is answered at a time, for the whole team. If a teammate asked something a second before you, yours waits its turn. A small coloured label next to the person’s name tells you what is happening.

You will not be shown everyone at the start. Additional people become available when your team asks about the right topic with someone who would plausibly refer you onward. This mirrors real fieldwork, where one interview earns you the next.

Documents work the same way. Some are given to you at the start, some are released by your instructor, and some are handed over by a person during an interview when you ask about the subject the document covers. When something new arrives, a short notice appears in the corner and the sidebar updates.

People you have unlocked normally stay available, though your instructor can change that if the case needs it. Documents can be withdrawn from view too, so open and read what you are given rather than assuming it will be there later.

Your instructor can post updates to the whole class. Important ones appear at the top of your workspace and every interview page until you press Got it. Acknowledging is per person: clearing it for yourself does not clear it for your teammates.

Some updates are marked Correction. These override what a stakeholder previously told you. If a correction contradicts something in your transcript, the correction is what counts.

Every update, read or unread, stays listed under Updates from your instructor at the bottom of the workspace.

You share one transcript per person with your whole team. Everyone sees every question and every answer, labelled with the asker’s first name. Nobody has a private conversation.

• Read what your teammates have already asked before starting. The sidebar shows a message count for each person.
• Divide people between you rather than duplicating interviews. Repeated questions make everyone wait longer and rarely produce new information.
• New messages from teammates appear automatically within about twenty seconds, or immediately with Refresh.
• Because the transcript is shared, a good question benefits everyone. A vague one clutters the record for everyone too.

Your team can name itself. Use Rename on the team card of the workspace page; the name must be unique in your class and is visible to your teammates and your instructor, who can change it.

Speech is entirely optional. Every reply is always shown as text, whether or not it is read aloud, and recognised speech always lands in the message box for you to check before it is sent.

There are two kinds of voice in the settings list. Natural voices are generated by this app on your own computer and sound markedly better than anything most machines ship with. Everything else comes from your operating system, so what you get depends on your machine.

Do the download once, on a decent connection, before you need it. On a slower or older computer the voice takes longer to start speaking; if that bothers you, a device voice will always be quicker.

The rest of this page is for adding better device voices, which is worth doing if you would rather not download anything, or if the natural voices are slow on an older computer.

The workspace page offers Download Markdown and Download CSV. Both contain every conversation your team has had with every person, in order.

• Markdown is for reading, quoting in a report, or pasting into a document.
• CSV is for analysis in a spreadsheet: coding themes, counting who said what, tracing where a requirement came from.

Export before you write anything up. Being able to cite the exact words a stakeholder used is far more convincing than paraphrasing from memory.

The simulation rewards the same habits a real interview does. A few that make an immediate difference:

1. Open before closed. “Walk me through how an order gets processed today” yields more than “Do you use a spreadsheet?”
2. Ask for the last time it happened. Concrete recent examples surface details that general questions never reach.
3. Follow the pain. When someone complains, ask what it costs them, how often, and what they do instead. That is where requirements live.
4. Chase every proper noun. A named person, system, form or report is a thread worth pulling.
5. Ask the same question of two people. Disagreement between roles is a finding, not a problem.
6. Check what you think you heard. Summarise it back and ask whether you have it right. People correct a wrong summary more readily than they volunteer a missing detail.
7. Ask what you have not asked. Closing with “What should I have asked you that I did not?” is reliably productive.

Interviewees answer from their own role and perspective. Asking a warehouse supervisor about board-level strategy will get you a warehouse supervisor’s view of it, which may be exactly what you need, or may mean you are asking the wrong person.

If a stakeholder breaks character, contradicts itself inside a single answer, or describes something that clearly does not belong in this case, tell your instructor. Someone being guarded, vague, or unwilling to speculate is not a fault: people are like that, and getting past it is the skill being taught.