Welcome

Welcome to Learning Sciences for Intelligent Textbook Design — a hands-on book for people who want to build next-generation educational content with AI, and who want the learning sciences to be the reason it actually works.

About This Book

Learning Sciences is an emerging interdisciplinary field that synthesizes cognitive science, educational psychology, neuroscience, and instructional design to explain how people actually learn — and how we can design environments, content, and feedback loops that accelerate that learning.

This book is organized around the Seven Domains of the Learning Sciences:

1. Learner Motivation and Engagement — the gateway to attention and encoding
2. Understanding New Knowledge and Ideas — how meaning is constructed
3. Knowledge Retention — turning encounters into durable memory
4. Knowledge Application — using what we know in new situations
5. Building Expertise and Mastery — from novice to pattern-recognizer
6. Measuring Learning and Optimizing Feedback — closing the assessment loop
7. Creating and Improving Learning Conditions — the environment that holds it all together

What makes this book distinctive is its relentless focus on application through AI. We treat the learning sciences not as abstract theory but as a practical toolkit for authors building interactive intelligent textbooks with tools such as Claude Code, Claude Agent Skills, MkDocs Material, MicroSims, and learning-graph-driven content pipelines.

Who This Book Is For

• Graduate students in learning sciences, instructional design, and educational technology
• Adult continuing education learners
• Instructional designers and curriculum developers
• Educational technologists
• Professional developers interested in authoring AI-augmented learning experiences

No programming experience is required. Basic familiarity with Markdown and generative AI tools is helpful but not assumed.

How to Use This Book

Use the left navigation to explore:

• Chapters — the main narrative, one chapter per key idea
• Learning Graph — an interactive map of the 200+ concepts and their dependencies
• MicroSims — small, hands-on interactive simulations you can run in the browser
• Glossary — concise definitions for every term introduced in the book
• Instructor's Guide — classroom tips, pacing suggestions, and customization instructions

Along the way, you'll meet Bloom the Elephant, our learning mascot. Bloom shows up to flag a key idea, warn about a common trap, or nudge you to pause and retrieve what you just read.

A Note on Scope

This book teaches Level 2 of the five-level classification of intelligent textbooks — interactive textbooks built with learning graphs, MicroSims, and path recommendations that require no collection of individual student data. The jump from Level 2 to Level 3 is the privacy inflection point where FERPA, COPPA, GDPR, and CCPA/CPRA obligations begin. We name that boundary and deliberately stop there.

Getting Started

Start with Chapter 1: Foundations to begin.

Ready? Let's build a mental model.