Curriculum workbook pipeline

Context

An international school in İzmir teaches the Turkish national curriculum (MEB) in English, and could not buy the exercise books it needed, because nobody prints MEB-aligned workbooks in English. Each book has to cover the official learning outcomes for its subject and year, read naturally for children learning in a second language, and be correct the first time. There is no second edition for a printed book.

What I built

A pipeline that starts from the official MEB programme PDFs and ends with a bound, print-ready A4 volume. Claude parses and translates the outcomes, including the process notes that quietly define what must not be taught at that year, so a unit that teaches an out-of-scope concept is blocked even when the maths is right. Sonnet drafts each unit as structured JSON; code then enforces the rules the model forgets, such as overwriting outcome codes from the cache because MEB does not number them the way a model expects.

The book itself is rendered by headless Chrome against a frozen design specification: fixed page geometry at 144 pixels per inch, 7 mm writing lines, fifteen implemented question types, and a hard rule that an unimplemented type is a change request, never a silent blank box. Every report is bound by SHA-256 to the exact bytes it describes. Re-render the PDF or edit the JSON and the sign-off is invalidated automatically.

• Data store
• Model or agent
• Check or gate
• Person
• External service

The print gate keys on the category of a defect rather than its severity, because severity drifted between runs while a real answer-key contradiction sat behind a green light for seven weeks. Scope violations, factual errors and answer contradictions block at any severity.

Outcome

Thirty-two units generated across Mathematics, Science and Social Studies for Years 2 to 8, twenty-six rendered to PDF at 25 to 61 pages each, two bound Year 5 volumes, and four books issued to teachers. A unit costs roughly a dollar in model calls, most of it verification. The school has since asked for a costed twelve-course programme.

What I’d do differently

Put the repository under version control on day one instead of ten weeks in, which is how three Year 6 units were lost. Scope units from the books the school actually issues, not the programme document, because a teacher’s book opened with geometry and mine did not. And build the render-fidelity check before shipping anything, not after. The first four books reached classrooms correct, sparse and unillustrated because the brief only asked whether the arithmetic was right.