Teaching Materials Database

Claude Code opens inside a folder on my computer. Each folder holds one kind of work along with everything that has been written down about it, and the agent reads those files before it does anything. Dividing the information this way lets each agent concentrate on its own role, working only from what it has been given. My college folder and my personal folder may both hold a schedule, for example, but the two schedules are about different things, and neither agent should confuse one with the other. I keep more than ten of these folders: some for the college, some personal, and some that exist for a single job, such as one piece of software.

Course materials, lecture transcripts and lab notes

One of these folders holds my teaching materials, built as a database. An agent read through my slides and wrote their content out as text files, organized by chapter and topic. It also linked the transcripts Zoom makes of my lecture recordings to the matching slides, so for any topic I can see both what the slides say and how I taught it in class. The folder holds my lab materials and the documents I have written for the college as well. During CHEM V120B last summer I sent field notes to it from the lab bench through the phone bot described above. Each recorded what went wrong with a procedure and what to change next time, written within minutes of seeing it. The lab technician's preparation emails and photos are there too, filed by course and by experiment in date order, so before a lab I can see how that experiment has been set up in past years. This semester the full-term section runs ahead of the late-start one, so after a full-term lecture an agent reads the Zoom transcript against my plan and drafts what to change when I teach that chapter to the late-start section.

As the material grows, reading through all of it for every question stops working. An agent also analyzes new material as it comes in, so comparisons across semesters are ready when I need them, as with the list below.

Recurring student difficulties

I have taught CHEM V101 three times with recordings. The notes built from the Zoom transcripts of those three semesters list, chapter by chapter, the places where students got stuck, each tagged with how many of the three semesters it came up in. A place that came up once may come from something that happened that day. A place that came up in all three comes from the material itself, and students will likely get stuck there again. I read this list the evening before I teach a chapter, and it decided which of the simulations described below were built first.