The question at the end

Listening to a whole lecture feels like having understood it, and the only thing that separates understanding it from having heard it is trying to recall it without looking. So when the slide ends, before moving on, Mina asks you one thing.

It is not an exam and it does not keep score. You turn it off with the Questions switch in the dock settings, and if the question is not ready yet the slide ends the way it would without them: you are never made to wait for one. In silent mode, which has no end of audio, it shows up when you move to the next slide yourself.

Four ways, and they take turns

Choosing among options is recognition; filling the gap is producing the word; answering the open one is saying the whole thing; explaining the slide out loud is giving it back. Only one of the four, across forty slides, would be the same exercise every time.

• Multiple choice. Up to four short options, and the wrong ones are the topic's typical confusions, not absurdities you rule out at a glance. Picking is answering: there is nothing to confirm.
• Fill the gap. A word is missing from a sentence and you type it. If it does not match, you see the right word next to yours and you decide whether you had it: a typo is not the same as not knowing.
• The open question. Answered from memory and in words. Nobody marks it: you see the answer and say whether you had it.
• Explaining it out loud. Every fourth slide, using the microphone. It runs on your plan's transcription time, so if this month's has run out, one of the other three takes its place.

The other three are dealt out by slide number, and the spoken one falls every fourth slide precisely so it does not always land on the same kind of slide: every twelve slides, each of the four ways comes up three times.

Telling it in your own words

You tap Start talking, tell the slide back the way you would tell a friend (up to four minutes) and it tells you which ideas you covered and which you did not: "You explained 3 of 5 ideas", plus two or three sentences on what you left out, while the frame points at the parts of the slide you said nothing about. No mark and no score: the only thing worth knowing is what was missing.

What you say is transcribed in the cloud, and the recording is not kept. The text is compared against the script's ideas, not against the slide's words. Explaining well means not repeating: if the idea is about coupling and you say "how much one module depends on another", that idea is explained. Counting matching words would have called it missed.

Naming is not explaining: saying the term without saying what it means does not count. And when in doubt it does not count in your favour, because having one extra idea to review is no big deal and being told you explained something you did not is.

A question that fails the check is not shown

The question is asked about what was explained and the answer has to be on the slide. Both conditions are in the request to the model, but neither is taken for granted: what comes back is checked in code (that the answer is on the slide, that no two options say the same thing, that the right one is not the longest, that the missing word appears only once) and a question that fails is thrown out. If it was multiple choice or fill the gap, it tries once more with an open question; if that fails too, the slide ends with no question. A cover slide or a photo, with very little text, gets none.

With the answer in front of you, answering is reading

While the question is on screen the script goes away and the slide blurs. Once you answer, the slide comes back with the frame placed where that answer lives, which is what turns "I didn't have it" into "it was right here".

What you got wrong comes back later

When you say you did not have it, the part of the slide where the answer was gets noted, just like the paragraph that was playing when you asked Mina something from the viewer. That is where Practice starts next time, and you will find it under Worth another look on the document's page. There is nothing to mark by hand: getting it wrong and asking already say what is shaky.