Article
YAKKI and the school textbook: a companion for the programme
The gap
An English teacher in an Israeli school works from a specific textbook - most often one of the Erich Cohen Books series. Each unit has its own vocabulary, its own grammar, its own kinds of exercises. All of it is printed in the book and known in advance.
Yet when the teacher wants to give the class digital practice, the tools go blank. An app offers "food", "past tense", "animals" - topics in general. It does not know what this class is covering this week, and it has never seen the book on the desk.
So the teacher is left with a choice between two bad options: skip digital practice altogether, or spend the evening assembling it by hand.
The idea
Let the app read the textbook.
Not to copy it, and not to replace it. To understand what a given unit teaches, and to offer practice for exactly that.
How it works
Three steps, and only the last one is visible to the teacher.
First, YAKKI builds a map of the unit: the words it introduces, the grammar it practises, the constructions it uses, the kinds of tasks the author sets. This is the skeleton of the unit, the same one the teacher sees in the table of contents, only in a form the system can work with.
Second, YAKKI matches the map against its own library of games. Every game knows what it trains: vocabulary recall, word order, tense choice, listening, reading, spelling. The map says what the unit needs; the library says what can deliver it.
Third, the teacher opens the unit and finds practice already waiting. Not "food as a topic", but the very words printed in the word box of that unit. Not "the past tense in general", but the forms the book introduces on those pages.
What it changes
For the teacher, preparation turns from an evening of assembling into one choice: which unit the class is on.
For the pupil, practice stops feeling like a separate app that lives its own life. It is the same material as in the lesson, only repeated as many times as this particular child needs, which is the one thing a classroom cannot give.
For the parent, the answer to "what did you do in English today" stops being "some game on the tablet" and becomes the unit in the book they can open and look at.
There is a precise word for this: synergy. The textbook brings the order and the authority of the syllabus; the app brings the repetition a lesson has no time for. Neither side loses: the book is not displaced but worked through more deeply, and the app stops being entertainment beside the lesson and becomes its continuation. The result is greater than what either side gives on its own.
On copyright
We do not reproduce textbook content and we do not store it. What a unit gives us is what is not protected: which words are taught, which grammar topics are covered, what kinds of exercises there are. That is the skeleton of a syllabus, not the substance of a book. The exercises themselves are ours.
Where we are
The mapping works and has been applied to the Erich Cohen Books series used in Israeli schools. The maps exist, the games are matched, the accuracy of the matching is measured against control lists compiled by hand.
What remains is the visible part: the teacher choosing a unit inside the app. That is the work in front of us now.
We are building a tool that neither argues with the textbook nor replaces it. It takes what the teacher is already covering and lets the class drill it as many times as needed.