Explore AI Agent Skills & Claude Prompts

Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development and scaffolding as a working framework for learning support. Covers the ZPD definition, the distinction between independent and assisted performance, the six scaffolding functions (recruitment, reduction in degrees of freedom, direction maintenance, marking critical features, frustration control, demonstration), fading, sociocultural mediation, and the relationship between ZPD and deliberate practice. Use when deciding how much help to give, designing collaborative learning, or assessing a learner's ceiling rather than just their current floor.

yoga-practice-and-alignment

Yoga practice with an emphasis on alignment, props, and staged progression as the Iyengar lineage teaches it, alongside enough context about the broader lineage landscape (Krishnamacharya's three students, modern Hatha, Ashtanga vinyasa, restorative, Yin, and chair yoga) that a routing agent can place a user correctly before giving instruction. Covers asana families, alignment heuristics, prop use, sequencing, and the non-negotiable injury-prevention rules. Use for any query about yoga postures, home practice design, teacher-training-level questions, or whether a given pose is safe for a given body.

ecosystem-dynamics

Ecological organization, energy flow, food webs, biodiversity, succession, and species interactions. Covers trophic structure, primary productivity, nutrient transfer efficiency, keystone and foundation species, ecosystem services, carrying capacity, disturbance regimes, primary and secondary succession, and resilience metrics. Use when analyzing how living communities are organized, how energy and matter move through ecosystems, how disturbance and recovery shape landscapes, or why biodiversity matters for ecosystem function.

bird-observation

Birding by sight and sound — gestalt, song and call vocabulary, behavioral and habitat clues, and the discipline of producing eBird-grade records. Covers the vocabulary of bird field marks, the primary categories of vocalization, the habits of habitat-filtering, and the protocol for submitting records to a citizen-science database without degrading data quality. Use when the task is bird-specific observation or record-keeping.

field-identification

Identifying species in the field using dichotomous keys, gestalt recognition, diagnostic features, and habitat context. Covers the working identification protocol from first encounter through confidence-rated record, the vocabulary of field marks, the discipline of negative evidence, and the honest reporting of uncertain IDs. Use when the task is to name a living organism encountered in the field.

nature-journaling

The discipline of keeping a field notebook — words, pictures, numbers, metadata, and questions captured during sustained outdoor observation. Covers the Laws notebook method, the sit-spot practice, phenology recording, sketch-first-name-later discipline, and the long-term research value of accumulated journals. Use when the task is to teach or structure ongoing field observation rather than answer a one-shot identification.

species-interaction-tracking

Following what organisms do — behavior, metamorphosis, host-plant relationships, social dynamics, and the long-form ethograms that reveal how species actually live. Covers the vocabulary of ethology, the structure of a life cycle, the classic categories of species interaction, the discipline of recording behavior without premature interpretation, and the gap between a single observation and a statistically useful record. Use when the task is to understand or record what a species does rather than what it is.

taxonomic-classification

Naming and classifying organisms through binomial nomenclature, the Linnaean hierarchy, type specimens, and the rules governing taxonomic authority and revision. Covers the structure of a scientific name, the ranks from domain to subspecies, the codes (ICZN, ICN, ICNP), and the modern phylogenetic refinements that reshape the classical system. Use when the task is to place a known organism in its formal hierarchy or to reason about how names change over time.

ecosystem-mapping

Reading a habitat — identifying biome, plant community, food web structure, successional stage, and the keystone species that hold the system together. Covers the elevational and latitudinal gradients that Humboldt first mapped, the structural vocabulary for describing a habitat, the core concepts of food-web and trophic analysis, and the practice of diagnosing habitat health from indicator species. Use when the task is to understand a place rather than a species.

orbital-mechanics

Classical orbital mechanics from Kepler to Hohmann. Covers the six orbital elements, Kepler's three laws, vis-viva, orbit types (circular, elliptical, parabolic, hyperbolic), transfer orbits, gravity assists, the two-body problem, and practical methods for computing ephemerides. Use when reasoning about planet motion, spacecraft trajectories, comet orbits, exoplanet transits, or binary star dynamics.

design-process

Engineering design cycle covering requirements elicitation, specifications writing, constraint identification, iterative prototyping, and design communication. Spans the full loop from problem definition through ideation, analysis, prototyping, testing, and redesign. Includes morphological charts, TRIZ, Pugh matrices, design reviews, and the distinction between functional and non-functional requirements. Use when framing engineering problems, generating design alternatives, writing specifications, or running design reviews.

engineering-ethics

Engineering ethics covering safety, professional codes of conduct, public welfare responsibility, whistleblowing, case studies (Challenger, Columbia, Hyatt Regency, Bhopal, Therac-25), and the ethical dimensions of design decisions. Includes the NSPE Code of Ethics, the iron ring tradition, risk communication, informed consent in engineering, and the duty to dissent. Use when analyzing ethical dimensions of engineering decisions, teaching professional responsibility, or reviewing designs for safety and public welfare.