Assignments belong to a stream, so the first choice on the screen is a stream, not an assignment. Teachers and above create and mark them.
The four kinds
Homework. Free text and files. The brief is the description.
Weather. The student reads a forecast for a point given in the brief: what that wind means, whether to go or to wait. The assignment needs a coordinate — without one it is a stub, and the portal says so when you create it rather than leaving the student to discover it.
Chart work. Navigation on a chart: the student's own waypoints, courses and calculations.
Radio traffic. A situation from our phrasebook: calling a marina, asking for a berth, sending a distress message.
The brief travels with the assignment
A weather assignment carries the current forecast for its point; a radio assignment carries the phrase or the phrasebook category itself. The student does not have to go looking for the brief anywhere else.
The reason is simple. An assignment that requires opening another tab tests resourcefulness rather than knowledge — and two students looking at two different forecasts are answering two different questions.
When the clock starts
A submission record is created at the moment the student first opens the assignment, and it is never created twice. If a time limit is set, it runs from that moment.
Warn your students about the consequence: an assignment cannot be opened "just to have a look" — the clock will start. Reloading the page gives no extra minutes, because the record already exists and a second one will not appear.
Deadlines do not slam the door
Neither the due date nor the time limit prevents a submission. They mark it: late, over time. A person decides what to do about that.
This is deliberate. A machine that locks the door at midnight knows nothing about a broken internet connection, a watch at sea, or any of the reasons a teacher would accept without thinking twice.
One submission per assignment
Each student has exactly one submission per assignment. Sending work back does not create a second one, it changes the state: draft → submitted → returned → accepted. Teacher and student look at one thread instead of a dozen identical attempts, and the whole history of a piece of work stays in one place.
Who sees what
A teacher sees every submission for an assignment and the state of each. A student sees only their own: somebody else's answers "not found" — the existence of another person's work is no more their business than the existence of another school.
Assignments can be attached to a lesson. They then stand in the programme right next to it, which gives the student a real mark of progress — not "read it" but "handed it in".