Backward Builder
Curriculum design with AI as a thinking partner.
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 alignment between goals and assessments, and leaving every real decision with the teacher.
Why this project
This is the lab's education thesis made concrete: Intelligence and Creativity Amplification applied to the profession Wayne knows best. If AI can make a teacher better at designing learning — not just faster at producing documents — that's amplification. If it can't, we want to know why.
Status
Actively building. More here as it ships.