Pathlight Onboarding Assistant
A grounded AI chatbot that helps educators navigate a K-12 learning platform — ask a question in plain English, get back the exact click path, cited to the source doc it came from. Built to pair my instructional design background with applied AI engineering.
📊 Summary
- Wrote an original quick-start guide for a fictional K-12 platform ("Pathlight") — 16 Q&A entries across 6 sections: course catalog, enrollment, gradebook, assignments, accounts, and messaging.
- Built a retrieval step that scores guide entries against the incoming question and passes the top matches to Claude as context — no vector database needed at this scale.
- Constrained the assistant with a grounded system prompt: answer only from retrieved guide content, cite the source section on every response, and explicitly say "I don't know" rather than guess when a question falls outside the guide.
- Shipped a lightweight Flask API and a single-file chat UI — no build step required to run it locally.
🧰 Tools Used
- Flask (Python)
- Anthropic Claude API
- Keyword-overlap retrieval (custom, no vector DB)
- Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS frontend
💬 Live Demo
Three real exchanges from the working app, unedited.
Hi! I'm the Pathlight onboarding assistant. Ask me something like "how do I find high school math courses?"
How do I find high school math courses?
From the main dashboard, click Course Catalog in the left sidebar. Use the Grade Band filter and select "9–12," then use the Subject filter and select "Mathematics." Results update automatically and can be sorted by course name, teacher, or period.Source: Course Catalog > Filtering
— new question —
How do I reset a student's password?
Go to Students, open the student's profile, click Account, then Reset Password. A temporary password is generated and can be printed or sent to the student's guardian email.Source: Section 5: Accounts & Access
— new question —
How do I message a teacher?
Click the Messages icon in the top navigation bar, then New Message, and search for the teacher by name. The message will be private between you and that teacher.Source: Section 6: Messaging & Communication
📁 Source Code
View the full source, including the knowledge base, retrieval logic, and grounded prompt design, on GitHub.
Pathlight is a fictional platform built for this portfolio piece — all product names, screens, and guide content are original and not derived from any employer's proprietary documentation.