skuilder

Modular toolkit for the construction of interactive tutoring systems, with experimentation toward

• mass-collaborative authoring
• mixture-of-expert-systems guided learning
• self-healing courses via proactive surfacing of learning bottlenecks
• schema definition to share content between courses, e.g., a package manager for curricula
• MCP hooks for LLMs to responsibly generate structured content according to structured demand; slop on rails

Think: the FOSS lovechild of Anki, Duolingo, Wikipedia, and MathAcademy, with a more generalized surface area for the types of content and skills that can be exercised.

Also: friendly with local-first and static-deployments.

Quick Start

For Course Creators (building with vue-skuilder) (recommmended start point!)

Use the Skuilder CLI to create your first course:

npm install -g skuilder
skuilder init my-course --data-layer=static
# Or:
# npx skuilder init my-course --data-layer=static
cd my-course
npm run dev # serve your course locally
npm run studio # edit your course content via web UI

For Platform Developers / Contributors (building vue-skuilder itself)

Clone and develop the full platform:

git clone https://github.com/patched-network/vue-skuilder.git
cd vue-skuilder
yarn install
yarn setup # makes git submodule available - test database, builds library packages

After the setup, workflows will differ depending on what you are working on. To explore, I recommend:

yarn dev:platform

Which will build the components of the platform version of the software and serve locally.

• database: http://localhost:5984, with admin accound admin:password.
• express backend: http://localhost:3000
• platform UI: http://localhost:5173

Project Architecture

This monorepo is structured to support both platform development and course creation.

Broadly: an education system has User and Content as endpoints, with UI as the mediating software in between. We aim for flexible storange and delivery of User and Content data, and for easily extensible UI for rendering custom course content.

Here:

User

The only user abstraction in the project is the UserDBInterface, which lives in the @vue-skuilder/db package. It's powered by PouchDB, which stores data locally in the case of static courses, or syncs with a CouchDB backend in dynamic / platform deployments.

Content

Again, contained in the db package. Content is served over a core interface:

interface StudyContentSource {
  getPendingReviews(): Promise<(StudySessionReviewItem & ScheduledCard)[]>;
  getNewCards(n?: number): Promise<StudySessionNewItem[]>;
}

Various implementations satisfy this interface, but the important distinction is that content can be either static (JSON files) or dynamic (CouchDB database). The db package contains converters to transform courses between these form factors as well, enabling, e.g., checkpointing and portable deployment of a 'live' course.

UI

There are several UI application packages:

• standalone-ui: a skeleton static SPA for rendering a course. The thing that you'd deploy as user-facing.
• studio-ui: a focused content editor for individual courses, usable against either static or dynamic courses.
• platform-ui: ⚠️functional wip⚠️ a static SPA for managing many users and courses, allowing, e.g., multi-course study sessions, user course creation, classrooms (teacher-led cohorts). NB: the site itself is static, but it connects to a dynamic backend API and CouchDB database.
• tuilder: ⚠️non-functional wip⚠️ a tui for consuming courses in the terminal

And some shared UI packages:

• common-ui: a library of reusable Vue components and utilities
• edit-ui: course editing widgets used in both studio-ui and platform-ui

The courseware package contains base-types for course content rendering components, and also some domain-specific course logic and content type definitions (e.g., a Chessboard component for a chess course). In order to create custom content rendering components, you will extend from these base types.

All web UI is built with Vue 3 and Vuetify 3, in TypeScript, mostly with Composition API and Pinia state management. All web UI shares most of its config via ./vite.config.base.json

Glue

The express backend API server is responsible, in dynamic-data contexts, for:

• post-processing media content
• enforcing correct metadata in course databases
• handling various user requests
• and probably other stuff as well!

The common package contains some core logic and interfaces that define communication between components.

Utility

The cli package (published on npm as skuilder) gives commands to create, manage, or migrate courses. See packages/cli/README.md for more details.

🤝 Contributing

Please do:

• kick tires
• file issues (bugs)
• file issues (questions)
• file issues (feature requests, roadmap / vision discussions)
• open smallish PRs that present as clear wins, even without prior discussion

Probably don't:

• open large PRs without prior discussion

📄 License

This project is licensed under:

• AGPL-3.0 for the core platform: License
• MIT for materials in the courses package: License

Nightlies

The following e2e / cypress tests are run nightly on the main branch - a little slow for CI, but good for catching regressions while they are fresh.

These are not meant to be permantently green, but rather as safety indicators for publishing new packages to NPM.