Create Your First Assignment

Hi, it’s Jacob here and in this video we’re going to have a look at how to create our first assignment using Magma Maths. I’ll show you all the different assignment options, how to choose the exact questions you want for your students, and then how to send it out to your class.

To begin with, we’re going to press the New Assignment button in Magma. Straight away, you’ll see a whole lot of content. What’s great here is that Magma has dozens of built-in libraries of problems and questions that you can send to your students based on different schemes of work - for example, Maths No Problem, White Rose Maths, and of course the National Curriculum.

Each of these books contains many different sections, broken down by topics and concepts. Tapping on one shows you the different chapters inside that book, along with the number of problems contained within each chapter. Of course, tapping onto a chapter does exactly what you’d expect - it shows you all of the questions in that chapter, which you could then send to your students.

But before we get too excited with the actual questions, let’s rewind a couple of steps back to the book overview screen. You might be looking at this and thinking, “Wow, there’s tons of content here - this is amazing!” Or, equally, “Wow, this is a bit overwhelming - I only teach Year 4, why do I need all of this?”

Don’t worry - we can sort that before we get started. Scrolling to the bottom of the list, we can tap Add More Books. You might be thinking, “More books? I want fewer!” But here we can actually customise what appears. You can select the books linked to your scheme of work and year group.

Using the filter in the top right-hand corner, I can jump to particular schemes. For this demo, I’m teaching Year 5 and 6, so I’ll simply uncheck the books I don’t need. Of course, you can return to this at any time and make changes. That means you can add lower year group books to support learners, or higher ones to challenge advanced pupils.

As you can see, I’ve unchecked a lot of books but kept the White Rose ones for Years 5 and 6, as well as the KS2 SATs papers. When I press Save, the list looks far more manageable and much easier to navigate.

Now I want some Year 5 activities. I’ll tap onto my Year 5 White Rose Maths book and look for questions on subtracting four-digit numbers. The problems are broken into three categories: fluency, reasoning, and problem solving. All the questions can be added to our assignment. I can select a whole column, or pick questions individually.

At first I had 26 questions selected - too many for today’s lesson - so I deselected some, leaving about 12, which feels right. As I go, I can preview questions and make judgements about which skills I want my learners to practise.

Now I can customise the assignment. At the top, the title is very long - “Step 3: Subtract numbers with more than four digits.” I can edit this easily to something shorter and friendlier for my students. You can rename it to anything that works for your class.

A powerful feature here is choosing which students receive the assignment. By default, it’s set to the whole class. But tapping into the class list lets me select or deselect individuals. This means I can quickly adapt - supporting learners who need extra practice and challenging others who are ready to move further.

Finally, before sharing, we can tweak the assignment settings. For example, we can choose to share it immediately or schedule it for later. This is great for supply teachers, future planning, or team teaching. We can also set the number of attempts per question, require units, or enable “show workings.”

I always leave “show workings” on, because it encourages students to demonstrate their thinking. Magma’s clever AI ensures they can’t just type an answer and move on - they must show their process first. (In a future tutorial, we’ll explore how that feature lets you see exactly how they worked things out.)

At this point, my assignment is ready. I’ve chosen the problems, selected the students, and set the options. All that’s left is to press Create. Back on the assignments overview, I can see my new assignment ready to go. Right now, there’s no data, but next time we’ll look at the insights once my students have completed it.

See you then for more on Magma Maths!