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Welcome to AWzone.

This is Matt AW's public bulletin board: product development, projects in teaching & learning and healthcare, and fun experiments.

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Posted by

Matt AW

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Public note

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6 min

Note

Replacing a curriculum RAG stack with a small, read-only MCP server

This is a field note about retiring an expensive retrieval prototype without losing the useful product and instructional lessons it produced.

What changed when we stopped treating semantic search as the product and started giving an agent a bounded way to navigate curriculum structure.

  • OpenSciEd
  • MCP
  • Retrieval
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Project areas

Project boards

Learning + curriculum

Curriculum, teacher planning, and student-work tools.

  1. Project topic

    Case study

    AI-supported student-work analysis

    A teacher-co-designed prototype for analyzing student writing, aligning feedback to a rubric, and surfacing class-wide trends in Wauwatosa.

  2. Project topic

    Open source

    OpenSciEd Educator

    An installable role combining curriculum resource finding with a four-phase pacing workflow for teachers and instructional leaders.

  3. Project topic

    Live beta

    OpenSciEd Library MCP

    An experimental agent-friendly interface for retrieving and making use of open educational resources from OpenSciEd.

  4. Project topic

    Open source

    Pacing Coach

    A conversational planning workflow that keeps the teacher in control of calendar, sequence, and pacing decisions.

Classroom media

Working examples for classroom audio and discussion.

  1. Project topic

    Open source

    Classroom Transcripts

    An Azure-based workflow for transcribing classroom audio, identifying teacher and student voices, and supporting discussion analysis.

Side projects

Things built outside the main line of work.

  1. Project topic

    Native + web

    That Movie Night Life

    A shared movie-night picker on the web and in SwiftUI for iOS and tvOS, drawing from a 10,734-film Letterboxd list with watched-title and buzz-kill filters.

    View source

  3. Project topic

    Open source

    Henry's Habitat

    A Raspberry Pi dashboard for Henry the red-footed tortoise, combining Zigbee temperature and humidity readings with a live habitat camera.

Board operator

About the sysop

I'm Matt AW. I work across product development, learning design, user experience, and applied AI. I'm interested in how people understand things, and in the ways technology can make ordinary work easier or unlock discovery.

Helpful solutions can create meaningful benefits for people.

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