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Changing helpfulness of an activity in Flint

How to change whether an activity gives answers or guidance.

Updated September 26, 2026

How do I change Sparky's helpfulness?

First, open the Activity Settings for the activity you want to change the helpfulness for. With the chat-style activity builder, you can ask it to be more or less "helpful" with plain language, similar to how you might coach a TA to give students help. If you're not sure what the options for being helpful are, you can ask Flint "What are the options for customizing how helpful you will be?", and Flint will respond knowing the context of your desired activity similar to the screenshot below:

Sparky listing ways to make an activity more or less helpful in the Activity Builder chat

You can be a bit vague initially too and Flint will give you an updated activity to test. You can request further changes based on how the preview of the activity behaves.

Asking for a medium amount of helpfulness and viewing the updated Guidelines for Flint

Where can I input exactly how helpful I want Flint to be?

If you know what prompting language you want Flint to follow in terms of helping students, you can put that in the "Guidelines for Flint" under the "Build Manually" tab.

Guidelines for Flint field highlighted in the Behavior section of Build manually