aDNA Teaching Kit

A ready-to-import syllabus for teaching agentic literacy. Nine tutorials, three weeks, one coherent arc — from navigating your first vault to federating work across instances. Built for university instructors, bootcamp leads, and workshop facilitators. The structure is the lesson: students learn aDNA by building an aDNA vault.

Week 1 — Foundations

Explore a live vault, sort content into the triad, write the first governance file. End of week: a forked project vault with a working CLAUDE.md.

Navigate an aDNA Vault

Week 1 · 15 min · Beginner — guided tour of a live aDNA vault. Students learn the triad and governance files by walking them.

Apply the Question Test

Week 1 · 15 min · Beginner — sort 10 sample items into what/how/who. First structural-thinking exercise.

Create Your First CLAUDE.md

Week 1 · 20 min · Beginner — students write the agent-orientation file for their forked project vault.

Week 2 — Building Blocks

Add knowledge to the vault — context files, ontology extensions, first mission. The move from consumer to producer.

Write a Context File

Week 2 · 30 min · Intermediate — quality-rubric-scored context file ready for their vault library.

Extend the Ontology

Week 2 · 25 min · Intermediate — domain-specific entity type with directory, AGENTS.md, template.

Design a Mission

Week 2 · 25 min · Intermediate — decompose multi-session work into claimable objectives.

Week 3 — Systems

Compose work into larger wholes: executable lattices, phased campaigns, federated exchange with peer vaults. The course ends shareable beyond the classroom.

Build a Lattice

Week 3 · 30 min · Advanced — validated .lattice.yaml as a directed graph of modules.

Run a Campaign

Week 3 · 30 min · Advanced — phased multi-mission initiative with quality gates.

Federate a Vault

Week 3 · 30 min · Advanced — export, import, and compose lattices across aDNA instances.

Assessment

  • Navigability grade — can a classmate from a different discipline navigate your vault and understand your domain? Dual-audience as grading rubric.
  • AGENTS.md routing — do the routing files correctly guide a fresh agent to the right working files for a given task?
  • Mission decomposition — does each objective name a verifiable deliverable? Can a peer claim and complete one without additional context?

Facilitation notes

  • Start every class in the vault, not in slides. Open a file, point to it, name the concept it demonstrates.
  • Pair students across disciplines — a CS student and a humanities student on one vault surfaces the dual-audience tension immediately.
  • Use convergence as the grading heuristic: a well-designed mission narrows broad scope to specific action. Vague objectives are the most common failure mode.

Next Steps

Educator Persona

Full pain points, typical ontology extensions, and adoption narrative for university instructors.

Educator Use Case

Long-form narrative: how a graduate course in AI-augmented knowledge work runs on aDNA.

Dual-Audience Writing

The assessment rubric turned into a writing discipline: can a non-expert navigate this vault?