Private student seats
Give a class access with a link. No email address, no account, and no personal information collected.
Britt Espinosa
Last Update há um mês
Private seats are for classrooms where students should not have to hand over an email address. Each seat is a join link. A student opens the link and is in, with a place to build and save circuits at the group's plan tier. CircuitSim never asks the student for any personal information: no name, no address, no email.
Private seats are available on Educational License Groups, to owners and admins. Each seat uses one license from your block.
Creating seats
Open the group and go to the Private seats tab. Choose Add seats. The dialog asks for:
- Seat names, one per line. These are private labels so you can tell the seats apart on your own roster. Only the group's owners and admins ever see them, and students never do. They are stored with the seat, so use a seat number or initials rather than a full name or a student ID if you want the roster itself to hold nothing personal.
- Require students to set a passphrase. With this on, a student picks a passphrase of at least four characters the first time they open their link and reuses it to get back in. With it off, opening the link signs them straight in.
- A confirmation that you will share CircuitSim's terms with the students you hand links to. The Create seats button stays greyed out until this is ticked.
Handing out the links
As soon as the seats are created, CircuitSim shows the join links once. Copy them then. Copy all puts the whole set on your clipboard as seat number, name, and link, laid out so it pastes cleanly into a spreadsheet or a mail merge.
If you lose a link, the seat's menu has Show / reset join link, which issues a fresh one. Reset & copy all links at the top of the page does the whole class at once and keeps every student's account and circuits.
What the student sees
The student opens the link and, if you turned passphrases on, is asked to set one. Then they are in. They can build, simulate, and save circuits, and take part in the group. Their account has no profile, no billing, and cannot create groups of its own. If a link has been reset or revoked they see a short message asking them to get a new link from their teacher.
Managing seats through the year
The Private seats table shows each seat's status as Unclaimed, Active, Expired, or Revoked, along with the last login and the expiry date. The menu on each row offers:
- Reset join link. A new link for the same student. Their work is kept.
- Reset passphrase. For the student who has forgotten theirs.
- Deactivate seat and Reactivate seat. Temporarily switch a seat off.
- Reset for new student. Deletes the current student's account and circuits, then issues a fresh link. Use it between terms.
- Revoke permanently. Deletes the seat and frees the license.
The last two are permanent and delete student work. Both ask you to type the seat name to confirm. If you want to keep a student's circuits, export them before you reset.
Privacy
Nothing is collected from the student. No email address, no name, no profile. The only data held against a seat is the private label you typed for it and the date it last signed in, both visible only to the group's owners and admins. Analytics and marketing cookies are switched off for seat accounts, and a seat is logged out automatically after 30 minutes of inactivity. This is what makes private seats workable for younger students where collecting email addresses would be a problem.
If your school needs a data processing agreement or has questions from a privacy officer, email [email protected] and we will work through it with you.
Still stuck?
CircuitSim is built by a small team and we are happy to help. Email [email protected] and tell us what you were doing and the name of the circuit or group involved. If you are talking to the chat assistant, leave your email address in the chat and one of us will reply.