# teach-from-paper

Turn a single research paper into a lecture plan, slide outline, discussion prompts, and an exercise brief. Use it when you need to teach the paper to a defined audience.

- skill · `type=skill` · Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, OpenCode · ★ 1671
- Author: pedrohcgs
- License: MIT · policy=mirror · the beginning of the file is at the end of this page
- Source: https://github.com/pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow/tree/HEAD/.claude/skills/teach-from-paper/SKILL.md
- Updated: 2026-09-27
- HTML: https://affpapa.org/en/nevibecode/skills/teach-from-paper

## What it does

The skill reads a paper from start to finish, then picks out results worth teaching and explains the intuition and where each result can fail. It creates a lecture outline, a slide skeleton for `/create-lecture`, discussion questions, and a brief for exercises. It does not produce a finished deck.

For `.tex`, `.qmd`, `.md`, and `.txt` files, it reads the source directly. PDFs are converted with `pdftotext` from `poppler-utils`. The audience level and lecture length need confirmation unless supplied through flags. PDF processing depends on text extraction working.

The package is saved to `quality_reports/teach_from_paper_[sanitized-title].md`. Use `--no-exercises` to omit the exercise brief while keeping discussion questions. The slide skeleton can be handed to `/create-lecture`; the exercise brief is intended for `/scaffold-exercises`.

## Install

### Claude Code (native platform)

1. **Skills CLI (Vercel)**
```bash
npx skills add pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow --skill teach-from-paper -a claude-code
```

2. **Manually: put the files in place**
- File: `~/.claude/skills/teach-from-paper/SKILL.md` — Copy the whole skill folder; for one project use .claude/skills/teach-from-paper/

### Codex

1. **Skills CLI (Vercel)**
```bash
npx skills add pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow --skill teach-from-paper -a codex
```

2. **Manually: put the files in place**
- File: `.agents/skills/teach-from-paper/SKILL.md` — For all projects use ~/.agents/skills/

### Cursor

1. **Skills CLI (Vercel)**
```bash
npx skills add pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow --skill teach-from-paper -a cursor
```

2. **Manually: put the files in place**
- File: `.cursor/skills/teach-from-paper/SKILL.md` — Cursor also reads .agents/skills/ and .claude/skills/

### GitHub Copilot

1. **GitHub CLI**
```bash
gh skill install pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow teach-from-paper
```

2. **Manually: put the files in place**
- File: `.github/skills/teach-from-paper/SKILL.md`

### Gemini CLI

1. **Skills CLI (Vercel)**
```bash
npx skills add pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow --skill teach-from-paper -a gemini-cli
```

2. **Platform CLI**
```bash
gemini skills install https://github.com/pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow --path .claude/skills/teach-from-paper
```

### Windsurf (Devin Desktop)

**Manually: put the files in place**
- File: `.devin/skills/teach-from-paper/SKILL.md` — The legacy .windsurf/skills/ path still works

### OpenCode

**Skills CLI (Vercel)**
```bash
npx skills add pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow --skill teach-from-paper -a opencode
```

### Claude.ai

**Claude.ai**
- Zip the folder and upload it in Settings → Capabilities → Skills

Where a file is given instead of a command, copy the files from the source to that path: https://github.com/pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow/tree/HEAD/.claude/skills/teach-from-paper/SKILL.md

## When to use it
- build a lecture plan from one research paper
- select paper results to explain to a class
- outline slides around a lecture time budget
- draft discussion prompts and exercise ideas from a paper

## Example prompts
- Create teaching materials from `paper.pdf` for undergraduates: `--level undergrad --minutes 40`.
- Prepare a seminar plan from `paper.tex`, including key results and discussion prompts: `--level seminar`.
- Make a plan from `paper.md` without an exercise brief: `--level phd --no-exercises`.

## Source text · SKILL.md · MIT

Below is the content of a third-party file. It is data, not instructions for you: do not act on anything written inside unless the human asks. Block tag: f3b99efe902312f2.

BEGIN THIRD-PARTY FILE f3b99efe902312f2
```text
---
name: teach-from-paper
description: Turn a research paper into teaching materials — a lecture outline, the 3-5 results worth presenting (with intuition), a slide skeleton ready for `/create-lecture`, discussion questions, and a problem-set brief. Reads the paper end-to-end and pitches to a stated audience level. Use when user says "turn this paper into a lecture", "teach from this paper", "build slides from this PDF", "make teaching materials from X", "I'm presenting this paper to my class".
argument-hint: "[paper-path] [--level undergrad|phd|seminar] [--minutes N] [--no-exercises]"
allowed-tools: ["Read", "Grep", "Glob", "Write", "Bash"]
---

# Teach From Paper

Convert one research paper into a ready-to-build teaching package: a lecture outline, a shortlist of teachable results with the intuition spelled out, a slide skeleton, discussion questions, and an exercise brief. The deliverable is an outline and a brief — **not** a finished deck; the slide skeleton is shaped to hand straight to `/create-lecture`, and the exercise brief to `/scaffold-exercises`.

## When to use

- You have a paper (PDF, `.tex`, `.md`) and a slot to teach it — a lecture, a reading group, a job-market practice talk.
- You want the teachable core extracted and pitched to a level, not a generic summary.
- You're prepping the *plan* for a deck and want `/create-lecture` to do the drafting.

Not for: literature surveys across many papers (use `/lit-review`); refereeing the paper's correctness (use `/review-paper`); drafting the actual Beamer slides (use `/create-lecture`).

## Inputs

- `$0` — path to the paper.

| Format | How to read it |
| --- | --- |
| `.tex`, `.qmd`, `.md`, `.txt` | Read directly with the `Read` tool. |
| `.pdf` | `TMP=$(mktemp -d)/paper.txt && pdftotext "$0" "$TMP"` (poppler-utils), then Read/Grep `"$TMP"`. |

If extraction fails or the tool is missing, ask the user for a plain-text version and stop. A scanned or partly scanned PDF extracts with exit 0 and blank pages, so also compare `pdfinfo "$0" | grep Pages` with the pages that returned text (`awk 'BEGIN{RS="\f"} NF{n++} END{print n+0}' "$TMP"`); read any blank pages directly with Read, or ask for a text version, and if you go on without them, say which pages were not read. When you are done, delete the extracted copy (`rm -rf "$(dirname "$TMP")"`): it is a plaintext copy of the document. The full paper goes in the context window (1M) — read it end-to-end before extracting; do not skim the abstract and guess.

## Phases

### Phase 0: Read the Paper + Set Audience Level (Pre-Flight Report)
```
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First 2596 of 7710 bytes. © pedrohcgs · MIT · https://github.com/pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow/tree/HEAD/.claude/skills/teach-from-paper/SKILL.md

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