Activate your king as much as possible before using your extra pawn to distract the enemy king.
Also move your other pawns a few times too, that way they'll be closer to queening. After the enemy king captures your outside passed pawn, it will run back to the other side, so it's nice to give your other pawns a little bit of a head start.
Thanks for the reply, i finally managed to qin this drill. However with so many trial and error I dont think i learned anything useful. I just happened to do the right moves. The rest of the deills are even harder. How hard are these things supposed to be? Is it something a beginner like me should be able to do?
Its against the engine so it will be tricky. Opponents wont be as accurate. The important point is the general technique explained by @llama47.
Yeah, some positions that are "easily" winning vs humans will be tough (or nearly impossible) vs engines.
Don't be discouraged, just go with the flow. It's happened many times that I've put a lot of effort into trying to understand a position, only to realize after a few days of working on it, that I'm still somewhat confused... but then I'll come back to it a week or one month later, and suddenly things start clicking, and it all makes sense.
So I'd say beating the engine once is great milestone. Play some games, study some other ideas, and don't think about it for a while. Come back to the outside passed pawn exercise a few weeks from now and see whether it's making more sense to you.
I'm currently a beginner chess player (around 900 rapid) and i'm looking for ways to improve. One of these ways is (i'm thinking) to practice the drills. But this particular drill is so uncontrollable to me. I'm not asking for help with this particular drill, I'd like to know what fundamental theory/experience I lack that makes me completely clueless about what to do. I understand the basic concept of keeping the king busy with the extra pawn so I can remove the other pawns with my king. But i'm completely dominated by the engine every time. I don't know where to go from here? any advice?