Study rooms & notebooks.

This module's name — "study rooms & notebooks" — covers three different things in the app, and it is worth naming them cleanly before we open a screen.

Notebooks are the core: a per-subject digital notebook the student writes in, at /portal/notebooks, with a teacher's window at /dashboard/class-notebooks. That is the fully built heart of this handbook. The study hub at /dashboard/study is the school's optional, gamified personal-learning environment — XP, levels, streaks, goals, a leaderboard, and the NOVA AI tutor chat. It is a real, separate surface, documented in its own chapter here.

The third idea — a quiet "study room" to work in, and revision tools like flashcards — belongs to YELE, the AI study product, which has its own handbook. The notebooks module hands notes off to YELE (so a student's own writing can seed their study there), but the revision engine itself lives on the other side of that boundary. We flag it honestly rather than claim a flashcard deck this module doesn't have.

One notebook per subject, half of it shared and half of it private — the student's own page, kept for the whole year.

A student opens /portal/notebooks and sees one card per subject they are actively enrolled in. There is no "create notebook" button and nothing to name — tapping a subject opens its notebook at /portal/notebooks/[subjectId] and YESS provisions it on the spot. Exactly one notebook exists per subject per academic year; the database guarantees it with a unique constraint, so a student can never end up with two Biology notebooks to keep in sync.

Inside, the notebook has two sections, chosen by a tab. Notes is the shared section — the student's teacher of record and their linked parent can read it. Private is the student's alone. An entry is a title (optional) and a body; saving it writes a dated entry into the chosen section, and YESS counts the words for you. Entries list newest-first, and deleting one is a soft delete — it leaves the record intact underneath.

When a student joins a live class at /portal/live-classes, a notebook panel sits beside the video. It is not a throwaway scratchpad: it opens the student's real notebook for that subject and autosaves a note linked to the live session. The default is the shared Notes section, so a teacher can see who took notes; a toggle flips a note to Private.

Because in-class notes land in the ordinary subject notebook — just stamped with the session they came from — the student revises from one place. There is no separate "class notes" store to hunt through later; the notes from Tuesday's live lesson sit in the same Biology notebook as everything else, in date order.

A teacher opens /dashboard/class-notebooks, picks a subject and a section, and sees a roster with a note count per student for the last week — how many notes each wrote, how many words, and when they last wrote anything. The list surfaces the students with nothing first, because the point of this screen is to spot the child who copied nothing off the board this week and have a quiet word, not to grade prose.

The teacher can drill into a student to read their recent notes entries — and only their notes; the row-level rules make it impossible for the class-notebook window to reach a student's private section. A teacher can also pin a "default class notebook" for a subject and section for the current term, a light marker for the notebook the class is expected to keep, and clear it later.

Separate from notebooks, and switched on per school, is the study hub at /dashboard/study — YESS's personal-learning environment. It turns quiet, solitary study into something a student keeps coming back to. It is gated by a plan feature and a school-level "enabled" switch, so a school that doesn't want gamification simply never turns it on.

The notebook is complete for what it is — a flat, per-subject journal. A few edges are honestly thin, and the revision engine proper lives next door. Here is the straight picture.

The study surface sits between the live classroom, the AI tutor, and the academic record. Here is what plugs into what.