Your capstone is either hard or kind. It is rarely both.
Hard without safety produces fear. Safe without difficulty produces a certificate, and nobody changes. From inside your own course you can't see which one you built.
What it does
The Ordeal Designer works with the book's three ordeal models: the real-world project, the performance and the simulation. For each, you set difficulty and psychological safety out of 10. It plots all three on one map with four zones (Transformative, Comfortable, Threatening, Busywork) and tells you which way to move each one.
Design principle: the ordeal isn’t the cruelest part of your course. It’s the most loving part. The ordeal doesn’t test capability. It confers it.
The Cinematic Curriculum Method, Appendix §18, Three Ordeal Models
What you’ll do
Set difficulty and safety for each of the three models as they run now.
Add a note on how each one works, if you want to.
Press «Plot my ordeals».
What you get. A transformative-fit score out of 100, the map with your three models placed on it, a line on where each one lands, and three priority moves: where to raise the difficulty and where to build the safety. The report downloads as a one-page PDF.
Before and after
BeforeAs it opens: three ordeal models, every slider at zero.AfterThe app's own worked example, plotted: one model in Transformative, one too comfortable, one threatening.
Watch it work
1 / 6Open the Ordeal Designer. Three ordeal models, every slider at zero.
How to use it
Open the Ordeal Designer from My tools.
For The Real-World Project, The Performance and The Simulation, set Difficulty and Psychological Safety out of 10 as each runs in your course now.
Add a note on how each one works, if it helps. «Load Worked Example» shows a finished set.
Press «Plot my ordeals».
Read the score, the map and the three priority moves. Move a slider and plot again.