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Textbook Generation Pipeline

Run the Textbook Generation Pipeline MicroSim Fullscreen

About This MicroSim

The textbook generation pipeline is the ordered sequence of steps that turns a course description into a published book. This left-to-right flowchart shows six stages (teal boxes) and two quality gates (amber diamonds). A quality gate is a defined check that output must pass before the next stage begins. Each gate has a dashed red "No" branch that sends the work back to the stage before it.

Step Box Performed by
1 Course Description course-description-analyzer skill
2 Learning Graph learning-graph-generator skill
3 Quality Gate: Graph Valid? analyze-graph.py in the learning-graph-generator skill
4 Chapter Structure book-chapter-generator skill
5 Chapter Content chapter-content-generator skill
6 Quality Gate: Concepts Covered? chapter-content-generator skill
7 Media and MicroSims microsim-generator and book-media-generator skills
8 Deployment mkdocs gh-deploy command

Clicking a box fills the panel below the diagram with that step's one-sentence definition and the skill that performs it. Where a person reviews the output before the pipeline moves on, the panel says so.

This diagram is a simplified view. The full pipeline also produces a glossary, FAQ, quizzes, and references. The Book Build Workflow MicroSim shows those supporting steps.

How to Use

  1. Select Next to walk through the eight steps in order. The selected box gets a dark outline and the counter shows your position.
  2. Select Previous to go back one step.
  3. Click any box in the diagram to jump straight to it.
  4. At each amber diamond, read the If the check fails line and trace the dashed red arrow back to the stage that has to be redone.
  5. Keyboard users can press Tab to move between boxes and Enter to select one.

Iframe Embed Code

You can add this MicroSim to any web page by adding this to your HTML:

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<iframe src="https://dmccreary.github.io/ibook-skills/sims/textbook-generation-pipeline/main.html"
        height="377px"
        width="100%"
        scrolling="no"></iframe>

Lesson Plan

Audience

Adult learners, educators, and instructional designers who are about to build their first intelligent textbook with this skill library.

Learning Objective

Summarize the ordered stages of the textbook generation pipeline and where human review and quality gates sit within it. (Bloom's Taxonomy: Understand)

Duration

10 minutes

Prerequisites

  • Has read the definitions of agentic workflow, human in the loop, and quality gate in Chapter 2
  • Knows what a learning graph is at a high level

Activities

  1. Exploration (3 min): Use Next to step through all eight boxes. Say each step's output aloud before reading the panel.
  2. Guided Practice (4 min): Close the MicroSim and write the six stages in order from memory, then mark where the two quality gates go. Reopen the MicroSim to check.
  3. Assessment (3 min): Explain why the "Graph Valid?" gate sits before Chapter Structure rather than after Chapter Content.

Assessment

  • The learner lists the six stages in the correct order.
  • The learner places both quality gates correctly and names the stage each one loops back to.
  • The learner explains that a defect caught at a gate is cheaper to fix than the same defect found after later stages have been built on it.

Discussion Questions

  1. What would it cost to discover a cycle in the learning graph after every chapter had been written?
  2. Which steps have a person reviewing the output, and why those steps?

References

  1. Flowcharts Syntax - Mermaid - Documentation for the flowchart syntax and the click interaction used in this MicroSim.
  2. Directed acyclic graph - Wikipedia - The structure a learning graph must have to pass the first quality gate.
  3. Deploying your docs - MkDocs - How mkdocs gh-deploy publishes a site to GitHub Pages, the last step in the pipeline.