Design a Gold Standard Project Based Learning project around one real child.
Most PBL planning tools are class-shaped: one project, thirty students, differentiate later. PBL Builder inverts that. You start with a learner profile — grade, the standards they need to hit, one success skill to grow, what they actually care about, how they work, where they get stuck — and the project is designed outward from there.
It is built for homeschool, microschools, tutoring, and any setting where you are planning for one learner at a time.
learner-profile.md ──► project-plan.md ──► pbl review
who they are the project does it hold up?
Clone the repo, open it in Claude Code (or Cursor, Codex, or any agent that reads AGENTS.md), and say:
Help me build a PBL project for my 4th grader.
The agent reads CLAUDE.md, interviews you, writes a learner profile and a project plan into learners/, then checks its own work with the CLI and fixes what fails.
You can also install just the skills into an existing project:
npx skills add khash89/pbl-builder- Read
docs/00-start-here.md— it's a 10-minute orientation. - Copy
templates/learner-profile.mdand fill it in.docs/15-learner-profiles.mdexplains what makes a profile useful versus useless. - Copy
templates/project-plan.mdand work through it, usingdocs/06-design-process.mdas your guide. - Check your plan against
rubrics/project-design-rubric.mdbefore you launch.
No tooling required. Everything is plain Markdown.
Not sure it's worth the effort? Read one of the worked examples first — each one shows a profile and the project it produced.
The two JSON Schemas in schema/ are the contract. Framework data lives in framework/ as YAML with stable ids. Academic standards ship as JSONL in framework/standards/.
npx pbl-builder framework product-types --json
npx pbl-builder standards search "ecosystem" --grade 4 --json
npx pbl-builder review path/to/project-plan.md --jsonSee schema/README.md for the field-by-field reference.
Requires Node 20+.
npx pbl-builder --helpOr from a clone:
cd tools/cli && npm install && npm linkThen:
pbl profile new "Sam" # scaffold a learner profile
pbl profile check learners/sam/learner-profile.md
pbl standards search "watershed" --grade 4 # find real standards codes
pbl plan new --profile learners/sam/learner-profile.md
pbl validate learners/sam/project-plan.md # is it well-formed?
pbl review learners/sam/project-plan.md # is it any good?pbl review runs 13 deterministic checks against the Essential Project Design Elements — including whether the project actually reflects the profile it came from. It will tell you if you designed a generic project and attached a child's name to it.
| Path | What it holds |
|---|---|
docs/ |
The knowledge base. What PBL is, the design process, 16 classroom strategies, assessment, equity, grade bands, and how to run all of it for a single learner. |
framework/ |
Machine-readable canon: design elements, teaching practices, the Project Path, 12 product types, a scaffold library, 5 success skills, and academic standards. |
schema/ |
JSON Schemas for learner profiles and project plans. |
templates/ |
Fill-in-the-blank starting points, including 18 teacher and student handouts. |
rubrics/ |
Rubrics for evaluating a project design, your own teaching, and each success skill. |
examples/ |
Three complete profile → plan pairs across grades 4, 8, and 11. |
prompts/ |
Copy-paste prompts if you're using ChatGPT or Gemini with no repo access. |
learners/ |
Where your profiles and plans go. Gitignored by default. |
tools/cli/ |
The pbl command. |
learners/ is gitignored. Learner profiles contain information about a child — reading level, executive function, accommodations, what they struggle with — and that does not belong in a public repository.
Use a first name or a pseudonym. Every example in this repo uses an invented child. If you fork this repo to share a project design, share the plan, not the profile.
Two bodies of work, licensed differently.
The PBL framework is PBLWorks (the Buck Institute for Education): Gold Standard PBL, the seven Essential Project Design Elements, the seven Project Based Teaching Practices, the four-phase Project Path, and the five success skills. Their research and field-testing is what makes any of this work.
Everything in this repo is written from scratch and cited — no PBLWorks text, checklists, rubric language, or PDFs are reproduced here. When you want the official documents, go to pblworks.org/resources. Our rubrics are our own descriptors aligned to their skill definitions, and each one says so.
The academic standards come from the Learning Commons Knowledge Graph, licensed CC BY 4.0, which is why we can ship them directly. Provenance and the full attribution chain are in framework/standards/PROVENANCE.md.
See NOTICE.md for the complete attribution.
PBL Builder covers multi-week projects. If you need help with individual lessons, these are better tools and they install alongside this one:
- learning-commons-org/agent-skills — standards-aligned lesson planning and differentiation
- anthropics/k12-teacher-skills — K-12 teacher workflows
Yes please — especially worked examples for grade bands and subjects we don't cover, more standards jurisdictions, and translations. Start with CONTRIBUTING.md.
- Code in
tools/— MIT - Docs, templates, rubrics, and examples — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- Standards data in
framework/standards/— CC BY 4.0, see PROVENANCE.md
v0.1.0 — the schemas, framework data, CLI, and examples are complete and tested. Class mode (one project, many learners) is not built. It's the most likely v2.