Added documentation of Didactopus helping reduce 'offloading'

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welsberr 2026-03-14 21:58:44 -04:00
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Didactopus is a local-first Python codebase for turning educational source material into structured learning domains, evaluating learner progress against those domains, and exporting review, mastery, and skill artifacts.
Its intended use is closer to a structured mentor or self-study workbench than a "do my assignment for me" engine. The project should help learners get guidance, sequencing, feedback, and explanation without encouraging the offloading effect that comes from unstructured GenAI use.
At a high level, the repository does five things:
1. Ingest source material such as Markdown, text, HTML, PDF-ish text, DOCX-ish text, and PPTX-ish text into normalized course/topic structures.
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- progress artifacts
- a reusable skill grounded in the exported knowledge
The point is not to replace your effort. The point is to give your effort structure, feedback, and momentum.
If that is your use case, read the next section, `Fast Start For Impatient Autodidacts`, and skip the deeper architecture sections until you need them.
## Fast Start For Impatient Autodidacts
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The important idea is not "perfect ingestion first." It is "usable learning structure fast enough that you keep going."
### If you are using it alongside coursework
The intended pattern is:
1. Use Didactopus to clarify the topic map and prerequisites.
2. Ask it for hints, sequencing, comparisons, and self-check prompts.
3. Use its outputs to diagnose where you are weak.
4. Still do the actual writing, solving, and explaining yourself.
That is the difference between assisted learning and offloading. Didactopus should help you think better, not quietly substitute for your thinking.
### Current friction honestly stated
The lowest-friction path is the included demo. The custom path still asks you to be comfortable with:
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- evidence-aware progress artifacts
- reusable skill outputs for future tutoring or evaluation
In the best case, that makes learning feel more like active skill-building and less like either passive consumption or answer outsourcing.
## What Is In This Repository
- `src/didactopus/`

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Didactopus turns educational material into structured learning packs, then uses graphs, evidence, and review workflows to support human or AI learning against those packs.
## Is this meant to help me learn, or to do the work for me?
It is meant to help you learn.
The intended role is:
- clarify topic structure
- surface prerequisites
- suggest study order
- provide explanations, comparisons, and self-checks
- help you see where your understanding is weak
The intended role is not:
- silently complete coursework for you
- replace the need to explain ideas in your own words
- turn learning into answer copying
In other words, Didactopus is supposed to reduce confusion and friction without encouraging the offloading effect of unstructured GenAI use.
## Is this a packaged application or a research/workbench repository?
It is a workbench-style repository with runnable code, tests, example packs, generated outputs, and local-first review/demo flows.
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The current demos show the shape of a mentor workflow even though the agent itself is not yet a live external model integration.
## How should I use it if I am taking a course and do not want to hire a tutor?
Use it as a structured study companion:
1. Build or load a topic pack.
2. Use the path and prerequisite structure to see what to study next.
3. Ask for hints, comparisons, and explanation prompts.
4. Use progress artifacts to identify gaps.
5. Do the actual solving and writing yourself.
That keeps the system on the "guided practice" side of the line instead of the "outsourced thinking" side.
## What is the current evidence model?
The evidence engine supports: