Part 1 — Running a session

One session is one whole teaching session. It has a single join link, a single big-screen dashboard, and a single winner at the end.

Inside a session, your questions live in rounds — the Q&A moments you intersperse through your teaching:

Go to /teach on your church's PollTastic address and sign in with the email and password your administrator gave you. You'll land on your list of sessions.

Click + New session. Give it a title, then type your rounds and questions into the box. The format is plain text:

• A line starting with # starts a new round
• Every other line is a question: the prompt, then the options, separated by | — and put a * in front of the correct one

As you type, a line underneath tells you what it understood — e.g. "2 rounds, 3 questions". When that looks right, click Create session.

Questions without a correct answer. Just leave off the *. That question becomes an opinion poll — it still shows live results on the screen, but it doesn't count toward the contest. Great for "how many of us have actually read this chapter?"

You'll land on the session page. The Integration panel has everything:

Each has a Copy button. The dashboard link also has Open.

1. Open the dashboard link on the screen your congregation can see, and make it full screen. While no question is live it shows the join QR and the session code — which is exactly what you want on screen as people arrive.
2. Keep the session page (/teach/YOURCODE) open on your own laptop or phone. This is your control panel.
3. Paste the join link into your church group chat.

On your control panel, each question has buttons:

• Activate — the question opens on every joined phone (and the dashboard switches from the QR code to the live question). Phones that have web notifications turned on will buzz.
• Close & reveal — voting stops and the dashboard reveals the results, with the correct answer marked in green with a ✓.
• Re-open — if you closed one too early.

Only one question is live at a time. Activating a new one automatically closes the previous one.

Work through your teaching as normal, and activate each question when you reach its moment. The dashboard animates the bars as answers arrive — that is the part that gets people talking, so give it a few seconds before you say anything.

When you're done, click Finish & crown winner. This:

• ends the session,
• shows the final leaderboard on the dashboard,
• and sends the winner's phone a QR code.

The winner comes to you afterwards and shows you that code. Scan it with your phone's ordinary camera — it opens a page that says either:

• ✓ Verified winner — with their nickname. Hand over the coffee.
• ✗ Not a valid claim — the code isn't the winning one.

You don't need any special scanner app, and the winner never needed an account. Their name is a random nickname like "Kind Heron 52" — they stay anonymous throughout.

Who wins: most correct answers. Ties are broken by who answered fastest. Opinion questions (no *) don't count.

You can fix a typo any time before a question has answers. On the session page use Edit (same prompt | option | *correct format), Delete, + Add question to this round, or Rename a round.

Two deliberate limits:

• You can't edit a question while it's live — close it first.
• You can't edit a question that already has answers — because that would change the meaning of results people have already seen. Delete it instead.

You can let your slides open the questions for you, so you never touch a second device: reaching a tagged slide activates the question, closes it, or finishes the session.

In Keynote, put a tag in a slide's presenter notes (your audience never sees these):

Then run the small presenter bridge command shown in the Integration panel (copy it, it's pre-filled with your session code) and present as normal.

For PowerPoint, and for the full setup including the option that pops the dashboard up automatically, see PRESENTATION.md.

If your administrator has set up push notifications, people get a nudge when a question opens — useful when phones have been put down.

• Android: works from the browser tab.
• iPhone: iOS only allows this if the person taps Share → Add to Home Screen first, then opens PollTastic from that icon. Most won't bother, which is fine — the page updates live anyway as long as the tab is open, and the phone vibrates when a question appears.

Don't rely on notifications. Say "grab your phones" out loud.

• Do a dry run. Create a throwaway session, join from your own phone, and click through it once. Ten minutes now saves an awkward silence later.
• Two or three questions per round is plenty. The dashboard moment is the point, not the quiz.
• Base questions on what you just taught — that's what makes people feel they're being listened to rather than tested.
• Say the prize out loud early. A bag of coffee genuinely changes participation.
• Leave the QR on screen for the first few minutes; latecomers join fine at any point.
• The session code avoids confusable characters (no O/0, no I/1), so it's safe to read aloud.