Teacher portal

What this is

A primary-source research environment for K-12 and undergraduate students — every claim on the site resolves to a citable source, every entity has a versioned permalink and a DOI, and lessons are aligned to specific NM Public Education Department Social Studies performance standards. Designed for use in Silver City Consolidated and Cobre Consolidated school districts and at WNMU for undergraduate history courses.

Catalog status

• 1 published lesson
• 0 draft/in-review lessons

See the full catalog at the Learn hub.

License + classroom use

All lesson plans and scavenger hunts are licensed CC-BY-4.0. You can copy, modify, redistribute, and adapt them for your classroom — including derivative versions aligned to other states’ standards — provided you credit the Old West Grant County Project. The underlying primary-source data is also CC-BY-4.0; the per-source license (e.g., public domain for LoC items) is recorded on each source detail page.

Authoring a new lesson

Lessons are JSON files under content/old-west/lessons/<slug>.json. The TypeScript contract lives in src/lib/old-west/learn.ts (LessonPlan type). Required fields:

• nm_standards — at least one PED Social Studies performance standard code + description
• learning_objectives — bullet list of measurable outcomes
• steps — each step has a title, duration, body, and optionally entity_ids pointing into the knowledge graph
• assessment_prompts — discussion / exit-ticket questions

See the Apache Wars + Mangas Coloradas lesson as a worked example.

Authoring a scavenger hunt

Scavenger hunts are JSON files under content/old-west/scavengers/<slug>.json (ScavengerHunt type in learn.ts). Each stop has lat/lng for the physical QR location, a hint, a question, and the expected answer (case- and whitespace-insensitive match). See the Pinos Altos walking tour for the worked example.

Classroom dashboards (coming)

Authenticated classroom dashboards — student rosters, progress tracking, in-context citation analytics — are not yet built. They’ll land once the educational layer has enough adoption to justify the auth + multi-tenant infrastructure. For now, teachers can share lesson URLs directly with students and collect responses outside the platform.

Get in touch

Teachers piloting these materials, historians who want to author a lesson, and curriculum coordinators who want to adapt content for a specific district can email [email protected]. Pull requests welcome on the public GitHub mirror.