teach

name

teach

description

Generate teaching visuals for analytics and statistics concepts on demand. Each topic produces a small, opinionated set of charts that illustrate one intuition clearly — not a generic explainer, but the specific picture that makes the idea click. Use this skill whenever the user invokes `/teach <topic>`, says "teach me X", "show me the intuition for X", "make the chart that explains X", or asks for visuals to walk someone else through a concept. Trigger on phrases like "/teach", "teach signal vs noise", "explain variance with a chart", "show the intuition", "make a teaching chart", "I want to walk through X with a picture". Topics are extensible — each lives under `topics/` as a single Python script that renders to `outputs/charts/teach/<topic>/`.

Skill: Teach

Purpose

Render the canonical chart(s) for a teaching concept, so anyone with this repo can run /teach <topic> and get a consistent, slide-ready visual without re-deriving the layout, the parameters, or the takeaway.

How to invoke

The user will type one of:

• /teach <topic> — run the named topic
• /teach — list available topics

Available topics

Topic	Script	What it produces
signal-vs-noise	topics/signal_vs_noise.py	Two bell-curve charts (tight vs. wide SD, same means) + a side-by-side combined image. Illustrates that a 1.6-pt mean gap is a clear signal when SD is small and disappears in noise when SD is large.

Execution

1. Resolve the topic name to its script under .claude/skills/teach/topics/.
   • Accept hyphenated, underscored, or spaced forms (signal-vs-noise, signal_vs_noise, signal vs noise).
2. Run the script with python3. Each script is self-contained and writes to outputs/charts/teach/<topic>/.
3. Read each generated PNG back so the user can see it in the conversation.
4. Briefly summarize what each chart shows and the takeaway in 1–2 sentences.
5. If the topic is not in the registry, list available topics and stop — do not invent a new topic on the fly. Adding a topic is a deliberate step (see "Adding a topic" below).

Adding a topic

To add a new topic:

1. Create topics/<topic_name>.py with a main() that renders to outputs/charts/teach/<topic_name>/.
2. Use swd_style() and action_title() from helpers/chart_helpers.py so visuals match the rest of the repo.
3. Add a row to the topics table in this file with the script path and a one-line description of what it produces.

Output convention

All teaching charts go to:

outputs/charts/teach/<topic>/<chart>.png

outputs/ is gitignored — the script is the source of truth, not the PNGs. Re-running the skill regenerates them.