A student's guide to using Perplexity Spaces

As a student, you're probably constantly juggling multiple courses, projects, assignments, and extracurriculars. Organizing all this information can be challenging, and this is exactly why we’ve built Perplexity Spaces. It allows you to create a collaborative knowledge hub for your course, team, or study group. By using this hub, you can ask questions, create study guides, and even find relevant web resources—all in one place. This guide will walk you through how to use Perplexity Spaces, step by step, with examples designed specifically for students.

What is Perplexity Spaces?

Perplexity Spaces is a tool that helps you organize, search, and create content from your course materials, notes, and web resources. Think of it as your personal assistant for learning. You can create a space for each class, project, or even for your study group, then ask it questions or get help on specific tasks, like making a study guide or finding resources online.

Main use cases for students

Here are the key types of queries we recommend when using Perplexity Spaces:

1. Ask your knowledge base: Search through your class notes, syllabus, and course materials to find the answers you need.

2. Get help from the web: Use the web to find resources that complement your studies, from practice problems to online study guides.

3. Create content: Generate useful study materials, like practice exams or collaboration guides for group projects.

How to use Perplexity Spaces

1. Create a knowledge hub for your class

To get started, create a space for your class by clicking ‘Spaces’ in the left-hand menu on Perplexity. Make sure you have Perplexity Pro, or the option won’t appear. Next, click ‘Add Sources’ on the right side of your screen to upload your course documents, notes, and syllabus. If you want to give specific instructions, like ‘explain answers in an ELI5 way,’ you can do so by clicking ‘Add Instructions’ just above. This space will act as your personal or group resource for the course.

2. Ask questions from your class material

Do you remember solving a problem in a previous homework assignment but can’t remember where? No problem! Perplexity allows you to ask specific questions from your materials and retrieves the answers in seconds. Here are some examples to show you how it works.

↪ Could you summarize the main points from Week 5’s lecture?
↪ What was the solution to Exercise 2 from Homework 1?
↪ Compare the solutions to Questions 2 and 5 from Homework 1
↪ Based on the syllabus, what are the key topics I should focus on for the upcoming midterm?
↪ Please organize all my notes from The Good Life course

3. Get help from the web

If you need to find resources outside of your notes, Perplexity can also pull information from the web. Whether it’s a study guide, coding tutorials, or even a set of flashcards for a chapter in your textbook, you can easily ask Perplexity to do the searching for you. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate the process.

↪ Can you find me a set of online flashcards for each chapter in our syllabus?
↪ Can you find online practice problems for Week 6 of the syllabus that align with the chapters we've covered?
↪ Can you suggest articles related to Week 6 of the syllabus to help with my project?
↪ Can you locate math problems for Week 4 of the syllabus that match the difficulty of our homework?

4. Create a study guide

Need to prepare for a test? Perplexity Spaces can create a custom study guide for you, using all your uploaded class materials. It can also generate a study schedule, breaking down what you should focus on each day. These examples should help you understand how it works.

↪ Can you create a custom study guide for our midterm next week based on the syllabus (from week 1 to week 6)?
↪ Look through all my uploaded materials and generate a study schedule leading up to our final exam.

5. Collaborate on group projects

Perplexity Spaces isn’t just for individual use—it’s perfect for collaborating on group projects. You can share your space with team members, allowing everyone to access the same materials, ask questions, and generate project plans. Here are a few examples to guide you.

↪ Can you create a project plan for Exopt2, including task division and deadlines?
↪ Can you summarize the key steps we need to take to finish our exopt1 group project on time?
↪ Create a shared calendar for our group that includes deadlines and progress check-ins for Exopt1
↪ Can you draft an outline for our group’s Exopt2 presentation with suggestions on who should cover each section?

Benefits of using Perplexity Spaces for students

1. Centralized knowledge hub: Keep all your course materials, notes, and project documents in one place. This makes it easier to find answers and stay organized.

2. Time-saving: Instead of spending hours searching through notes or the web, Perplexity does the hard work for you by retrieving relevant information instantly.

3. Collaborative learning: Share spaces with classmates to create a shared knowledge hub, allowing everyone to benefit from the same materials.

4. Easy access to resources: Whether it's class-related queries or finding web resources, Perplexity helps you access the information you need, fast.

5. Create custom study tools: Generate study guides, schedules, and practice tests directly from your notes and materials, tailored specifically to your needs.

Try Spaces today

Whether you're prepping for an exam, working on a group project, or just trying to stay on top of class assignments, Perplexity Spaces makes it all easier. Start building your knowledge hub, and take control of your studies with Perplexity.