Exercises

An exercise in Sparkus is the guided, interactive work a participant does inside a program — things like setting a vision, reflecting on a question, planning actions, or completing a self-assessment. Exercises are built by a program admin or designer using a structured editor, then placed on the program’s journey so support receivers (and in some cases support givers or managers) can work through them.

The building blocks: package, steps, pages, modules

Every exercise is organized as a four-level structure:

Package — the exercise as a whole. A package has a name, a description, and one or more steps. A package is what gets attached to a program.
Steps — the stages of the exercise, shown in order. A step can require that certain conditions are met before it becomes available (for example, requiring a support giver to be matched first), and can define its own completion rule — either “every item in this step must be finished,” “at least a certain number of items must be finished,” or “this step unlocks only when a specific condition is met.”
Pages — each step is broken into one or more pages, which is how the content is actually paced for the person doing the exercise. A page can be set to appear only when a condition is met, and can be marked required or optional.
Modules — the actual pieces of content and interaction placed on a page: a question, a video, an assessment, and so on. Modules can be marked required, can be set to reveal themselves progressively, and can be hidden until a condition is satisfied.

Steps and pages can be reordered by dragging them in the editor, and the platform keeps a display order for packages, steps, pages, and modules so the sequence is always explicit.

Kinds of modules

There are more than thirty distinct module types available, which are grouped into a small number of practical categories to make the module picker easier to use:

Core interactive — the everyday building blocks: an open-ended question or reflection prompt, a multiple-choice or checkbox-style question, a list of questions answered together, a short self-assessment, and a group of self-rating sliders (for example, rating yourself against a set of competencies).
Advanced interactive — more structured, multi-step interactions: a vision board, a hierarchical “tree” input, an action planner, a guided goal-setting wizard, a guided action-listing wizard, a “list, prioritize, then add detail to top items” flow, and a final step for narrowing down and confirming top-priority goals.
Media & content — modules that mostly display information rather than collect it: custom formatted content blocks, video, audio, inspirational quotes, content carried forward from an earlier step (so an answer given earlier in the journey can be shown again later), and interactive content that tracks how a participant engages with it (link clicks, video views, time spent).
AI-assisted — a reflection module where the prompts themselves are generated dynamically by AI based on the participant’s own goals and context, rather than being fixed in advance.
Self-assessment — modules built specifically for rating and evaluating: a “slider”-style check that branches to different follow-up content depending on where the participant lands, a drag-and-drop categorization/ranking tool, a checklist of milestones, a tool for a manager or leader to place team members into categories and then assess them, and a module where a participant selects a fixed number of competencies to focus on.
360° feedback — one module manages who is invited to give feedback about a participant (with both a manual and an automatic mode), and a companion module displays the aggregated, anonymized results of that feedback back to the participant.
Assessment results — modules that surface results from external or formal assessments: a simple link to a PDF report, a filtered view of specific assessment results, and a fuller report view that includes narrative insights generated from the assessment data.
Collaborative — modules that more than one person contributes to together over time, with a history of versions: a shared written response, and a shared, prioritized list.
External / integration — a link out to external content, an embedded “micro app” for more custom interactive experiences, and a read-only hierarchical list viewer.

Every module’s specific configuration (its question text, its options, size, validation rules, and so on) is stored as structured settings attached to that module, separate from the module type itself — so the same module type can be configured very differently from one exercise to another.

Authoring an exercise

Program admins author exercises through a dedicated editor inside the program’s setup area. The editor shows the step/page tree on one side and the content of the selected page on the other, so an admin can:

Add, duplicate, reorder, or remove steps and pages.
Add, configure, duplicate, reorder, or remove modules on a page.
Set step-level rules (for example, whether matching or a support giver must be in place before the step unlocks, and how the step decides it is “complete”).
Set page-level rules (visibility conditions, whether the page is required).

Alongside the editor, there is a structure view that gives a read-only, at-a-glance summary of the whole package — how many steps, pages, and modules it contains — and a diagnostics view that scans a package for problems an admin should fix, such as a step with no active pages, a page with no visible modules, duplicate ordering, or a module whose settings are invalid or missing required text. Where a fix is mechanical (like renumbering a duplicated order), the diagnostics view can apply it directly.

Templates and reuse

Exercises are not built from scratch every time. There is a library of template packages and template steps that are tenant-neutral starting points:

A whole template package can be cloned into an organization’s own library, becoming that organization’s own editable copy — changes to the copy never affect the shared template or any other organization’s copy.
Individual template steps can be pulled into an existing package from an “add from library” picker, without having to rebuild the whole package.
A package already in use can also be copied (“duplicated”) within an organization to start a new variant, and existing packages can be copied across programs, carrying their steps, pages, and modules with them.

This lets a company standardize on a proven exercise design while still being able to adapt its own copy freely, and lets an admin reuse a well-designed step (like a vision-board sequence) across several different exercises without recreating it.

From package to journey item

An exercise package only becomes something a participant experiences once it is placed on a program’s journey — the ordered list of items a program is built from. On the journey, an exercise shows up as a “Package” item alongside other item types like sessions, goals, or assessments. A program can have more than one exercise package attached (for example, an onboarding exercise and a separate mid-program reflection exercise), each occupying its own position in the journey with its own visibility and scheduling settings. Removing an exercise from a program detaches it from the journey without deleting the underlying package, so it can be reattached or reused later.