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Applied Example Microelectronics Tutor Demo

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Chris Sweet edited this page May 20, 2026 · 2 revisions

type: synthesis up: "Home_llm-wiki-memory-template" tags: [application, demo, education]

Applied Example: Microelectronics Tutor Demo

A conference demonstration of the wiki-llm pattern applied to undergraduate microelectronics education, using the Purdue SCALE curriculum (Arduino UNO + Elegoo Super Starter Kit). Treated as an empirical test of the template in a non-research domain.

The setup

A derived project (microelectronics-tutor-demo) instantiated from this template hosts a small wiki covering roughly 15 concept pages across three clusters:

  • Components: Arduino-Uno-Board, LED-Basics, RGB-LED, Current-Limiting-Resistor, Pushbutton-Switch, ...
  • Concepts: Forward-Voltage, Pulse-Width-Modulation, Common-Anode-vs-Common-Cathode, Floating-Input-and-Pull-Up-Resistors, ...
  • Code patterns: Arduino-Sketch-Structure, Blink-Pattern, analogWrite-for-PWM, ...

Typed edges between pages encode the curriculum's prerequisite graph: RGB-LED --extends--> LED-Basics, LED-Basics --requires--> Current-Limiting-Resistor, RGB-LED --uses--> Pulse-Width-Modulation, and so on. The graph is what makes the agent's Socratic navigation through prerequisites possible.

The contrast

Two short videos, same student, same Lab 1 assignment:

  • Video 1 (the shortcut, ~90 seconds). Student pastes the assignment into a generic Claude or ChatGPT chat, copies the response, submits. A follow-up diagnostic question reveals they cannot reason through the underlying concept.
  • Video 2 (the tutor, ~3 to 4 minutes). Same starting question, but the student is in a Claude Code session against the course wiki. The agent soft-redirects, scaffolds through the wiki pages, asks Socratic questions, watches the student reason through to their own answer.

The diagnostic question, "if you'd used a blue LED instead of a red one, would 220Ω still be the right resistor?", lands in both videos. The Video 1 student hesitates or guesses; the Video 2 student explains forward-voltage and recalculates.

What this tests in the template

  • Three operations under domain shift. Can /wiki-source ingest curriculum PDFs cleanly? Does /wiki-experiment adapt to "filed lesson outcomes" instead of "research findings"? The operations are domain-agnostic on paper; this is an empirical test of that claim.
  • Typed-edge traversal at the user-facing level. The agent's navigation across RGB-LED → Common-Anode-vs-Common-Cathode → Pulse-Width-Modulation is the visible demonstration of Typed-Edges-and-Frontmatter. The student sees the graph being used.
  • Soft-redirect behavior. The pattern this demo encodes is "AI that knows the course, not a gatekeeper": the agent always offers a constructive path, never refuses to help, and gracefully falls back to web search for out-of-scope questions.

Status

Conference talk scheduled for 2026-05-19. Wiki authoring and video scripts staged at microelectronics-tutor-demo/docs/demo/. Production work (filling the ~15 concept pages, recording the two videos, building the framing/closing slides) is the next phase.

What this is not trying to do

  • Not an anti-cheat tool; no detection or enforcement.
  • Not an LMS integration; standalone tool that runs alongside the course.
  • Does not track student progress for grading; per-student memory is opt-in and stays local.

The pitch is AI that knows the course makes exploring the course material the easy path, not an obstacle to it.

See also

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