From the manual to the screen
The process
How one class day becomes a deck. This is written out in full because the useful part is not the finished cards — it is the checks, and what they catch.
The forty minutes it has to fit
Early-morning seminary, Monday to Thursday, 6:30 to 7:10. The lesson is not the whole period, and building as though it were is the fastest way to run out of time:
| Minutes | What happens |
|---|---|
| 0:00–0:05 | Devotional |
| 0:05–0:15 | Personal scripture study on the day's chapters |
| 0:15–0:35 | The lesson — the twenty minutes the deck has to fit |
| 0:35–0:40 | Journal writing |
So a deck is built against twenty minutes, and it has to end somewhere a student can write from. Every lesson carries a journal prompt, and the last card is built to hand into it. Students keep spiral journals — four pages a week, one per class day, each with the scripture block, the principle, notes, and one goal.
The pipeline
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The calendar decides, not the mood
A pacing calendar maps every date to a scripture block and a lesson number for the whole semester. It is the source of truth. When the pace drifts, the calendar gets edited and the change is dated in the file — so the reason survives.
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Pull the manual lesson
The Church's teacher manual is 858 pages and 208 lessons. A script pulls the one lesson by number. It is read as raw material for the big idea — a manual lesson is always far larger than twenty minutes, so the job is choosing, not covering.
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Write the lesson as structured data
Not slides. A single JSON file holds the objective, the principle, the personal study assignment, every card's content, the teacher note, and the journal prompt. This is the source of truth; everything else is regenerated from it. Fix the JSON, never the output.
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Validate before spending anything
A checker confirms the schema, that the filename agrees with the contents, that the card layouts match the deck type, and that the date actually appears in the pacing calendar. It exits non-zero and stops the pipeline if not.
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Render the cards
An image model renders each card as a finished infographic with the text baked into the artwork. Design rules live in a separate style file, as data — change the look once and every future deck follows.
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Proofread every card, by eye, every time
This is the step that cannot be skipped. See below.
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Assemble and publish
The cards become a deck, the deck goes to Google Slides, and the lesson lands on this site.
What goes wrong
The text is inside the image. It cannot be corrected afterwards, only regenerated. That single fact drives most of the discipline here.
A real example, from this site
The Introduction to Proverbs lesson rendered its scripture list with "Proverbs 15:18–19" where the source file said 16:18–19. Proverbs 16:18 is "Pride goeth before destruction." Proverbs 15:18 is about a wrathful man stirring up strife — a different verse, in a different chapter, on a different subject, sitting under a caption that said "pride, and the fall after it."
Nothing automated caught it. The source file was correct; the render was not. It was found by reading the card and checking the reference character by character, and fixed by regenerating that one card.
Three things get checked on every card before it goes anywhere:
- Every scripture reference, character by character. Against the source file, not from memory.
- Every quotation against the actual verse.
- No crosses. Latter-day Saints do not use the cross as a symbol — the focus is the living, resurrected Christ rather than His death. Image models reach for a cross icon by default on any heading like "Christ Connection," so it is forbidden in the style rules and checked again by eye. Approved instead: a figure of the Savior, the Christus pose, praying hands, an open book, a sunrise, a heart, an olive branch, a shepherd's staff.
Density is the other lever
The more text on a card, the likelier it corrupts. The limits that hold up in practice: one or two lines per bullet, five or six items per list, one line per quotation, exactly five questions in the question band, exactly six items in an ideas strip. The one card that ever had to be re-rolled for density was the densest one on the page.
A phone is not a small projector
Virtual days get their own card shape, not a shrunk version of the classroom one. A 16:9 card is unreadable on a phone. The portrait card is one idea per panel, large type, generous space, no dense tables and no five-question band — because there is no teacher in the room to explain the second idea.
What AI does and does not do here
Students use AI directly, in class, on Card 1 — comparing passages, defining a word, putting a verse in their own words. Every deck ends that checklist with the same line:
Stay Spiritual: AI supports — the Spirit teaches.
On the building side, the same rule holds in a different form. AI drafts and renders; it does not decide what is true. Scripture references are cited exactly, doctrine is not invented, and nothing gets attributed to a Church leader without a real source. Every card is read by a human before a student sees it.