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Hands-on Lab1,682 words

Troubleshooting and Optimization — practice exercise

Troubleshooting and Optimization — practice exercise

Difficulty: intermediate · Estimated duration: 45–60 minutes

You will do this exercise in the Claude app. No code is involved. Where a stage depends on a setting or feature your plan may not have, it gives a written alternative, so every stage works on any plan. The scenario is invented for practice: you are the operations coordinator at a small secondary school.

StageWhat you practiceMinutes
1Diagnosing weak results and telling messages from quality problems12
2Recovering a short or cut-off answer10
3Changing the approach, not just the wording12
4Tuning a week of work14

Stage 1 — Diagnose six cases

Skills: CCAOF-U7.T1.LO1.S1, CCAOF-U7.T1.LO1.S3 Minutes: 12

For each case, write the likely cause and the fix. Then pick case 1 or case 2, write the improved prompt, and send it.

CaseWhat happened
1You asked “can you help with the Year 7 welcome?” hoping for a timed plan for the first morning, and got tips on settling in new pupils.
2Claude’s cover-staff plan assumes every teacher works full-time. A third of the staff are part-time.
3One message asked for a cover plan, a room-swap list and a note to parents about a heating failure. The room-swap list was skipped.
4The status page lists a confirmed incident affecting chats this morning, and a colleague wants to rewrite all her prompts.
5Deep into a term-long planning chat, you attached two more long policies and got an error that the message will exceed the length limit for this chat.
6Only your timetable chat gives poor answers; every other chat, and your colleagues’ chats, work normally. A colleague says Claude must be down.

Stage 2 — Recover a short answer

Skills: CCAOF-U7.T1.LO1.S2 Minutes: 10

  1. Send: Give me a short overview of how to run a fire drill. Note what the reply leaves out.
  2. Retool the prompt so that it says which parts to cover and how much detail each needs (for example: assembly points, roll call, timing, and how to record the result). Send it and compare.
  3. A colleague sent this prompt: Draft an exam-week invigilation plan covering rooms, staffing, arrival, late arrivals, toilet breaks and emergencies. The reply stopped partway, like this:

Exam-week invigilation plan. 1. Rooms: Hall (120 seats), Gym (80 seats). 2. Staffing: two invigilators per room, rotating every 90 minutes. 3. Arrival: candidates seated by 8.45. 4. Late arrivals: admit up to 30 minutes after the start, then

Write the first message you would send in a new chat to finish the plan.

Stage 3 — Change the approach

Skills: CCAOF-U7.T1.LO2.S1, CCAOF-U7.T1.LO2.S2 Minutes: 12

  1. Paste these three notes and ask Claude to turn each into a one-line summary in the format Room — Issue — Action — Owner:

Science lab 2: fume cupboard fan noisy again, Ahmed to call the contractor. Library: two ceiling tiles stained after the rain, site team to check the roof on Friday. Room 14: projector will not switch on, IT to replace the lamp.

  1. If the lines do not all follow the format, do not reword the instruction. Add a few varied example lines in the format (the prompting guide suggests 3–5), using rooms and issues that are not in the notes, then send again. If every line already follows the format, record that no change was needed.
  2. For each situation below, write the change of approach you would make, and the condition it depends on:
    • a. A timetable clash analysis for 40 staff comes back shallow.
    • b. A question about this year’s exam-board deadlines returns last year’s dates.
    • c. Routine cover-request emails take a long time and use up your allowance, with effort at its highest.

Stage 4 — Tune a week of work

Skills: CCAOF-U7.T2.LO3.S1, CCAOF-U7.T2.LO3.S2, CCAOF-U7.T2.LO3.S3, CCAOF-U7.T2.LO3.S4 Minutes: 14

Here is a week of your usage. For each day, name the habit that would have used your allowance better, and say why.

DayWhat happened
MondayYou asked for a staff bulletin, and Claude came back with questions about the audience, the deadline and what to include before it could start.
TuesdayThe school’s project holds 3 documents in daily use and 25 from last year’s events.
WednesdayYou proofread short notices all day with web search on, though none of them needed current information.
ThursdayYou asked Claude three related questions about the trip policy in three separate messages, hours apart, in the same chat.
FridayYou built the weekly room-bookings summary by hand again, from the room-booking system, which is connected to Claude.

Then:

  1. Rewrite Monday’s request as one message, and send it.
  2. Write, without running, the description of Friday’s summary as a scheduled task. Say which cadence it runs on and what it works with. If scheduled tasks are available to you, you may set it up; if not, the written description completes the stage.

Acceptance checks

  • Stage 1: each of the six cases has a cause and a fix; cases 4 and 5 are not treated as prompt problems, and case 6 is not treated as an outage. You sent one improved prompt.
  • Stage 2: your retooled prompt names the parts and the detail; your new-chat message carries the earlier prompt and response.
  • Stage 3: if the format drifted, you added varied examples rather than rewording (or you recorded that no change was needed), and each of a to c names a change and its condition.
  • Stage 4: each day names a habit and a reason, Monday’s request is one message, and Friday’s description names one of the offered cadences and what the task works with.

Reference solution

Stage 1.

  1. Unclear ask. “Help with” never said what you wanted. Explain it: a timed plan for the first morning of Year 7, from arrival to lunch.
  2. Missing context. State that a third of the staff are part-time, and their working days.
  3. A complex request left in one piece. Break it into substeps, one deliverable at a time, starting with the room-swap list.
  4. Not a prompt problem. A confirmed incident means Claude is unavailable or significantly degraded for all or most users. Rewriting prompts will not help; wait for the incident to be resolved.
  5. Not a prompt problem. The message is too long for this chat. The error itself suggests attaching fewer or smaller files or starting a new conversation.
  6. A prompt problem, not an outage. A service incident affects all or most users; here only one chat is affected, so diagnose that prompt against the three causes.

Stage 2. The first reply is short because the prompt asked for a short overview; the retooled prompt should name the parts and the detail for each. The new-chat message should include the colleague’s prompt and the partial plan as it stands, then ask Claude to continue from item 4, for example: Here is my earlier request — “Draft an exam-week invigilation plan covering rooms, staffing, arrival, late arrivals, toilet breaks and emergencies” — and your reply, which stopped partway through item 4 (late arrivals). Please continue from item 4, then cover toilet breaks and emergencies.

Stage 3.

  1. From the notes, the expected lines are: Science lab 2 — Fume cupboard fan noisy — Call the contractor — Ahmed; Library — Two ceiling tiles stained after rain — Check the roof on Friday — Site team; Room 14 — Projector will not switch on — Replace the lamp — IT. A few varied examples steer the format more reliably than rewording.
  2. a. Raise effort, turn on thinking, or both. Condition: only where your model offers them; either way, be specific about the problem. b. Use web search for the current dates. Condition: web search must be available to you; otherwise paste the dates from the exam board yourself. c. Choose a lower effort level: low and medium work well for routine tasks and stretch your usage further. Condition: only where your model offers effort levels; otherwise keep the defaults.

Stage 4.

  • Monday: plan the conversation. Provide the background upfront (audience, deadline, items), so Claude does not need to ask, and review the message before sending.
  • Tuesday: clean up the files you no longer use, and keep the core documents in the project knowledge.
  • Wednesday: ask Claude not to search the web when you do not need current information; tools are token-intensive.
  • Thursday: batch them. Related questions belong in a single message, which reduces the back-and-forth.
  • Friday: a scheduled task, described once, on a weekly cadence (one of the offered options: hourly, daily, weekly, on weekdays, or manually). It works through the room-booking connector, so it can run remotely while your computer is asleep. Scheduled tasks are available on paid plans, in Cowork and in the new Claude experience.

Monday rewritten, for example: Draft this week’s staff bulletin for teaching and support staff, due Thursday at noon. Include: the Year 9 trip reminder, the new visitor sign-in rule, and the date of the next INSET day. Keep it under 200 words.

Sources

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