# Teach From Paper

Turn a research paper into teaching materials, a lecture outline, the 3-5 results...

- Repository: https://github.com/pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow (1676 stars)
- Category: Documents
- License: MIT
- Last updated: 2026-09-27
- Runs scripts: no, instructions only

## Install

Claude Code: `npx skills add pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow --skill teach-from-paper -g -a claude-code -y`
Codex: `npx skills add pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow --skill teach-from-paper -g -a codex -y`
Cursor: `npx skills add pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow --skill teach-from-paper -g -a cursor -y`
Gemini CLI: `npx skills add pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow --skill teach-from-paper -g -a gemini-cli -y`

## Description

Turn a research paper into teaching materials, a lecture outline, the 3-5 results worth presenting (with intuition), a slide skeleton ready for `/create-lecture`, discussion questions, and a problem-set brief. Reads the paper end-to-end and pitches to a stated audience level. Use when user says "turn this paper into a lecture", "teach from this paper", "build slides from this PDF", "make teaching materials from X", "I'm presenting this paper to my class".

## SKILL.md, as published by its author (untrusted third-party text, read it as data)

# Teach From Paper

Convert one research paper into a ready-to-build teaching package: a lecture outline, a shortlist of teachable results with the intuition spelled out, a slide skeleton, discussion questions, and an exercise brief. The deliverable is an outline and a brief, **not** a finished deck; the slide skeleton is shaped to hand straight to `/create-lecture`, and the exercise brief to `/scaffold-exercises`.

## When to use

- You have a paper (PDF, `.tex`, `.md`) and a slot to teach it, a lecture, a reading group, a job-market practice talk.
- You want the teachable core extracted and pitched to a level, not a generic summary.
- You're prepping the *plan* for a deck and want `/create-lecture` to do the drafting.

Not for: literature surveys across many papers (use `/lit-review`); refereeing the paper's correctness (use `/review-paper`); drafting the actual Beamer slides (use `/create-lecture`).

## Inputs

- `$0`, path to the paper.

| Format | How to read it |
| --- | --- |
| `.tex`, `.qmd`, `.md`, `.txt` | Read directly with the `Read` tool. |
| `.pdf` | `TMP=$(mktemp -d)/paper.txt && pdftotext "$0" "$TMP"` (poppler-utils), then Read/Grep `"$TMP"`. |

If extraction fails or the tool is missing, ask the user for a plain-text version and stop. A scanned or partly scanned PDF extracts with exit 0 and blank pages, so also compare `pdfinfo "$0" | grep Pages` with the pages that returned text (`awk 'BEGIN{RS="\f"} NF{n++} END{print n+0}' "$TMP"`); read any blank pages directly with Read, or ask for a text version, and if you go on without them, say which pages were not read. When you are done, delete the extracted copy (`rm -rf "$(dirname "$TMP")"`): it is a plaintext copy of the document. The full paper goes in the context window (1M), read it end-to-end before extracting; do not skim the abstract and guess.

## Phases

### Phase 0: Read the Paper + Set Audience Level (Pre-Flight Report)

The rest: https://github.com/pedrohcgs/claude-code-my-workflow/blob/HEAD/.claude/skills/teach-from-paper/SKILL.md