Preparing a lab

Activities and personas

Dialog Lab organizes role-play around a clear theatrical model:

• Activity (The Production): The complete reusable simulation design. It defines the case scenario, participant briefing, learning goals, curricular source material, and instructions.
• Persona (The Actor): The reusable character identity: background, voice, visual avatar, and baseline temperament traits.
• Role in this activity (The Casting Call): Casts a persona into an activity, defining its role-specific knowledge, objectives, private facts, blind spots, and interaction archetypes.
• Lab (The Performance): One run of an activity with a specific series and its participants.

This separation allows you to reuse one case with different characters or cast one character into several different activities without duplicating or altering shared case material.

Design an activity with the 4-stage authoring flow

When creating or editing an Activity, Dialog Lab guides you through 4 progressive, focused stages:

1. Context & Briefing: Give your activity a descriptive title, select an activity type, write the participant-facing scenario briefing, and provide shared case context, source documents, and learning objectives.
2. Personas: Add reusable AI personas and give each a role in this activity. Set their interaction archetype (client, Socratic tutor, facilitator, skeptical counterpart, evaluator, novice student, or career and exploration guide), private objectives, secret facts, and blind spots.
3. Flow: Optionally configure in-conversation help requests and conversation visibility.
4. Settings & Review: Set recommended defaults (suggested_max_participants, target_duration_minutes, default_landing_instructions) and review live preview summary cards before saving.

Start from scratch or use the template library

You can build a new activity manually or adapt a library template:

• Browse the Library: Explore activity and persona templates by discipline and library category.
• Template lineage: An Activity or Persona detail page shows the source and copies you can access. A copy is independent: editing it does not change the source, and later source edits do not change the copy.
• Template actions:
  • Launch in Series: Instantly clones an activity template along with its personas into your series and creates a draft lab with provisioned conversations.
  • Add to Series: Adds an editable activity and personas to your series curriculum without launching an immediate lab.
  • Copy to My Library: Creates a personal editable template copy from any catalog item.
  • Save as Template: Makes a reusable library copy of an activity or persona.

Create a lab

You must be assigned as staff or owner for the lab series. See Accounts and permissions.

From your series, click New Lab:

• Lab title: A descriptive title for your syllabus and dashboard (e.g., "Morning Workshop").
• Activity selector: Select an existing activity from your series. You can also click the quick action triggers directly inside the dropdown:
  • ➕ Create a new activity... to launch the 4-stage authoring flow.
  • 📚 Import from Library... to browse and adopt templates.
• Lab entry / lobby orientation: Optional instructions participants see before entering a conversation.
• Conversation capacity: Set the number of conversations and maximum participants per conversation. Use 1 for individual conversations; choose a group size that fits your participants for group conversations.
• Publishing readiness: A lab can be saved as a draft while you prepare. An activity must be selected before publishing or starting the lab.

Check the participant experience

Before starting, verify that:

1. The series join code or QR-code link opens the intended series.
2. The activity briefing and landing instructions are clear.
3. Each persona's role and interaction archetype are correct.
4. The maximum participants per conversation fits your expected attendance.

Publish and start

A draft lab is hidden from participants. Publishing makes it visible on the series page, but participants cannot enter conversations until you start the lab. Start the lab when your session begins to open conversations.

Use the Projector view to present the QR code and readable join code. During the lab, monitor participant conversations in real time, and respond to requests for help.