Backward Builder

Name: Backward Builder
Brand: Free Beer Studio
Price: 15 USD
Availability: InStock

Curriculum design with AI as a thinking partner. Start from what students should learn, and keep yourself honest about it.

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Building now, for teachers and curriculum teams

Backward Builder's home screen: one field asking what students should understand by the end of the unit, with grade, subject and state selectors, a Start Planning button, and four example units below it.

Real backward design, without the busywork.

Outcomes first

[How every unit starts from what students should understand and be able to do.]

Evidence before lessons

[How it helps you design assessments before planning a single activity.]

A partner that pushes back

[How the AI asks questions instead of writing the unit for you.]

Units that stack

[How units connect across a course or a department.]

Your standards, your words

[How it works with the standards and language your school uses.]

Private by default

[Where school data lives, and what never leaves it.]

How it works

Name the outcomeWhat students should know, do and understand.
Design the evidenceWhat would prove they got there.
Plan the learningWith the AI questioning every choice.

[Second screenshot or short loop]

Most AI tools for teachers generate stuff — worksheets, lesson plans, quiz questions — and in doing so quietly take the teacher out of the thinking. The planning is the teaching. Automate it away and you've automated away the part that mattered.

Backward Builder goes the other direction. It's built on backward design — the framework where you start from what students should understand, work backward to what would count as evidence of that understanding, and only then plan the activities. The AI's job is to be a thinking partner through that process: asking the questions a good instructional coach would ask, pressure-testing the alignment between goals and evidence, and staying out of the way when the teacher already knows what they want.

It is amplification, not automation. The teacher leaves with a unit they understand end to end, because they designed it.

This is the first studio product — the thing Wayne needed, built the way the studio builds everything: intent up front, Hugh running the factory, Wayne reviewing before anything ships. Screenshots land here as the build does; none are staged.