A classroom's computers are, increasingly, tablets. Since June the simulator treats touch as a first-class way to work, and if you are planning a lesson on iPads or a student wants to poke at homework on a phone, here is exactly how the editor behaves, learned by building a circuit with it.

The gesture set

One finger on empty canvas pans. One finger on a component taps to select, or drags to move once it travels more than a nudge, so a wobbly tap does not relocate your chip. Two fingers pan and pinch-zoom simultaneously, anchored under your fingers, no matter what they are touching, which means you can never be trapped zoomed-in over a breadboard. A long press opens the right-click menu. Hit targets for pins, holes, and wires double in size, quietly, which is most of why wiring feels possible at all on glass.

There is deliberately no marquee selection on touch (empty-canvas dragging pans instead, because panning is what you do constantly), and there is no rotate gesture because the editor has no rotate to bind. Knowing what is absent saves you hunting for it.

Building: arm, then place

The palette's drag-and-drop is a cursor pattern, so touch replaces it: tap a part tile once to arm it (a ring marks it), then press and drag on the canvas, where a snapping ghost shows exactly which holes the part will land in, and release. Tap the tile again to disarm if you change your mind.

Wiring is two taps, source pin then target pin, with the draft shown between. Tapping empty canvas cancels the draft rather than adding a bend, and a Cancel wire button rides along while drafting. The essential commands live on an on-canvas action bar: undo, redo, delete, duplicate, auto-route, deselect, so nothing critical hides behind a keyboard you do not have.

The layout at phone size

Below tablet width the editor rearranges honestly instead of shrinking: Components and Inspector become bottom sheets (one at a time), the Analysis panel becomes a flyout, and a four-button dock along the bottom drives them with a thumb. The toolbar compacts to brand, title, Run, and an overflow menu. Safe-area insets are respected, so browsers with floating bars do not eat the dock. Tablets in landscape keep the full desktop layout with drag-resizable panels whose dividers accept a fingertip.

The setting lives at Settings → Editor → Touch controls: Auto, On, or Off, remembered per device. Auto follows whether the screen is a touchscreen, so a Surface with a mouse attached behaves like a desktop until someone touches the glass.

A lesson-shaped test drive

Our suggested first tablet exercise, tuned to the touch flow: build the LED-and-resistor circuit from the start of this series. Arm the breadboard tile, place it. Arm and place the Bench PSU, resistor, LED. Wire four connections with two taps each. Long-press the LED to find Duplicate. Run it, then open the Analysis flyout and watch the node. Every step exercises one touch pattern, and the whole thing fits in ten minutes, including the part where someone discovers pinch-zoom anchoring by accident and refuses to stop.

What to know before a whole class does this

Two candour notes. First, some fine manipulations remain mouse-shaped: dragging a potentiometer's knob in the Inspector works with a finger, but bending wire waypoints and dragging component leads are still precise-pointer work, so plan lessons around placement and wiring rather than artistic wire routing. Second, a heavy circuit costs the same computation on a tablet as anywhere, and school tablets are not workstations; the status pill will tell you honestly when a build outruns the hardware, and the SPEED control brings it back.

The setup notes for classroom devices live at docs.devoltapp.com/user/using-on-a-tablet. Tomorrow: the same editor with no pointer at all, building circuits by keyboard and screen reader.