Building Intelligent Textbooks

The Intelligent Textbooks site is Dan McCreary's step-by-step guide to building intelligent textbooks — online textbooks that go beyond static PDFs by adding search, site navigation, a glossary of terms, a table of contents, quiz management, rendered formulas, social-media previews, link checking, and an easy-to-visualize concept graph showing all the concepts in a course and their dependencies. The guide argues that many courses today can benefit from high-quality online textbooks with these features, and it shows how to build them using the MkDocs build system paired with the Material theme and generative AI to create and maintain the content.

The defining move is that the textbook is authored in Markdown and generated by AI, a concrete instance of the AI-assisted authoring pattern applied to course content: rather than hand-maintaining a large site, you describe the course and let generative AI produce and maintain the pages, with the toolchain handling navigation, search and the concept graph. A companion Claude Code Skills library claims to automate over 90% of the tasks required to build a level-2 textbook from a course description.

A corollary resource: MicroSims

The natural companion to this guide is McCreary's MicroSims library at https://dmccreary.github.io/microsims/ (source: github.com/dmccreary/microsims), which supplies the interactive simulations an intelligent textbook embeds. A MicroSim (micro-simulation) is a simple interactive simulation generated with AI to help teachers explain a concept, and it can be embedded in an intelligent textbook or any site that accepts an iframe. MicroSims are distinctive for three reasons: AI-assisted generation (standardized design patterns turn a natural-language description of a simulation into a shareable asset), universal embedding (a single HTML iframe element drops one into any page), and transparent, modifiable code (no black box — one click opens the sim in a web editor, and a Creative Commons license lets most teachers use them without license fees). The term was coined by Valerie Lockhart in 2023 after she found teachers and students could build simulations with the p5.js JavaScript library with little or no training.

The project also publishes a JSON Schema for MicroSim metadata so AI tools can generate searchable descriptors, with a faceted MicroSim registry on the roadmap. A research paper describing the framework — MicroSims: A Framework for AI-Generated, Scalable Educational Simulations with Universal Embedding and Adaptive Learning Support — is on arXiv (2511.19864). Sample simulations include Bouncing Ball, Projectile Motion, String Harmonics, Conway's Game of Life, Euler's Formula, and a stock-market returns chart, each running live on the site.

Who it is for

Instructors and instructional designers who want to build or maintain a course textbook, especially in higher education and professional training, plus faculty developers and anyone using generative AI to author educational content. It suits educators who are comfortable with a Markdown-and-Git workflow (or willing to learn it) and who want the AI to handle the site plumbing — search, navigation, concept graph — so they can focus on the pedagogy.

Notes and caveats

This is a practitioner's guide and toolchain, not a peer-reviewed study — it presents a workflow and its own educational rationale ("intelligent textbooks guide students through concepts on their quest for knowledge") rather than evidence of learning outcomes. The MicroSim research paper is the closest thing to empirical backing, and it is self-published on arXiv. Both projects are open source (the intelligent-textbooks repo reports an MIT license and 38 stars; MicroSims reports a Creative Commons license and 13 stars) and actively maintained. Concept graphs and glossary-first structure are genuinely useful for discoverability, but the guide assumes a fairly technical authoring workflow — MkDocs, Git, and generative-AI tooling — which may be a barrier for some faculty. As of ingestion the registry for MicroSims is still only on the roadmap, so finding a specific existing simulation relies on the site's own search and navigation.

Connected Concepts

• Curriculum Design
• Learning Design
• Pedagogical Patterns
• Generative AI
• Simulation
• Knowledge Graph
• Vibe Coding
• Open Source
• Design Thinking
• Educational Development