A companion to the textbook In Development · demo

The gap

A child in Israel learns English from a specific textbook — most often one of the Eric Cohen Books series. Each unit has its own vocabulary, its own grammar, its own kinds of exercises. All of it is printed in the book and known in advance.

Yet when a tutor or a parent wants to give the child digital practice for that unit, the tools go blank. An app offers "food", "past tense", "animals" — topics in general. It does not know which unit the child is on this week, and it has never seen the book on the desk.

So the adult is left with two bad options: skip digital practice altogether, or spend the evening assembling it by hand.

The idea

Let the app read the textbook.

Not to copy it, and not to replace it. To understand what a given unit teaches, and to offer practice for exactly that.

How it is meant to work

Three steps, and only the last one is visible to the adult.

First, YAKKI builds a map of the unit: the words it introduces, the grammar it practises, the constructions it uses, the kinds of tasks the author sets. This is the skeleton of the unit, the same one anyone sees in the table of contents, only in a form the system can work with.

Second, YAKKI matches the map against its own library of games. Every game knows what it trains: vocabulary recall, word order, tense choice, listening, reading, spelling. The map says what the unit needs; the library says what can deliver it.

Third, the adult who leads the child opens the unit and finds practice waiting. Not "food as a topic", but the very words printed in the word box of that unit. Not "the past tense in general", but the forms the book introduces on those pages. This third step is the part still in development.

What it would change

For the tutor, preparation turns from an evening of assembling into one choice: which unit the child is on.

For the child, practice stops feeling like a separate app that lives its own life. It is the same material as in the lesson, only repeated as many times as this particular child needs.

For the parent, the answer to "what did you do in English today" stops being "some game on the tablet" and becomes the unit in the book they can open and look at.

The textbook brings the order and the authority of the syllabus; the app brings the repetition a lesson has no time for. The book is not displaced but worked through more deeply, and the app stops being entertainment beside the lesson and becomes its continuation.

On copyright

We do not reproduce textbook content and we do not store it. What a unit gives us is what is not protected: which words are taught, which grammar topics are covered, what kinds of exercises there are. That is the skeleton of a syllabus, not the substance of a book. The exercises themselves are ours.

Where we are

A demonstration exists. The map has been built for the units of one textbook: its words, grammar and task types, matched to games in our library; the list of words taken from a unit is checked against a list compiled by hand.

What remains is the visible part: choosing a unit inside the app. That is the work in front of us.

We are building a tool that neither argues with the textbook nor replaces it. It takes what the child is already covering and lets them practise it as many times as needed.

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