Awe & Wonder Experience Designer Agent Skill

Design a moment of awe or wonder that hooks curiosity and deepens emotional engagement with content.

Context cost
4.4k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 17.7 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—v1.0
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Design a moment of awe or wonder that hooks curiosity and deepens emotional engagement with content. Use when opening units, introducing surprising material, or reigniting student interest.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

awecuriositydocumentationengagementkeltnerpositive-emotionwonder

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md17.7 kB · preview
--- # AGENT SKILLS STANDARD FIELDS (v2) name: awe-wonder-experience-designer disable-model-invocation: false user-invocable: true effort: medium # EXISTING FIELDS skill_id: "wellbeing-motivation-agency/awe-wonder-experience-designer" skill_name: "Awe & Wonder Experience Designer" domain: "wellbeing-motivation-agency" version: "1.0" evidence_strength: "emerging" evidence_sources: - "Keltner & Haidt (2003) — Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion" - "Keltner (2023) — Awe: the new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life" - "Valdesolo & Graham (2014) — Awe, uncertainty, and agency detection" - "Shiota, Keltner & Mossman (2007) — The nature of awe: elicitors, appraisals, and effects on self-concept" - "Gottlieb, Keltner & Lombrozo (2018) — Awe as a scientific emotion" input_schema: required: - field: "lesson_content" type: "string" - field: "student_level" type: "string" optional: - field: "subject_area" type: "string" - field: "awe_trigger" type: "string" - field: "student_profiles" type: "array" - field: "available_resources" type: "string" - field: "lesson_duration" type: "string" output_schema: type: "object" fields: - field: "awe_moment_design" type: "object" - field: "vastness_element" type: "string" - field: "accommodation_bridge" type: "string" - field: "teaching_sequence" type: "object" chains_well_with: - "perma-based-lesson-designer" - "motivation-diagnostic-task-redesign" - "lesson-opening-designer" - "critical-thinking-task-designer" teacher_time: "3 minutes" tags: ["awe", "wonder", "curiosity", "Keltner", "engagement", "positive-emotion"] ---
70# Awe & Wonder Experience Designer
71
72## What This Skill Does
73
74Designs a moment of awe or wonder within a lesson — an experience that stops students in their tracks, creates a sense of vastness (something bigger, more complex, or more beautiful than expected), and triggers the "need for accommodation" (the drive to update one's mental model to make sense of something that doesn't fit). The critical principle is that awe is not a decorative add-on — it is a cognitive event that opens students to new information, reduces fixed thinking, and creates the motivation to learn. The output includes the awe moment design, an analysis of what creates the sense of vastness, a bridge connecting the awe moment to the learning objective (so wonder leads to inquiry, not just entertainment), and a teaching sequence that uses the awe moment to drive deeper engagement with the content. AI is specifically valuable here because designing awe moments requires both subject expertise (knowing what IS genuinely astonishing about the content) and psychological knowledge (knowing how to present it for maximum impact) — and because teachers, familiar with their content, may have lost the capacity to see what is awe-inspiring about material they've taught dozens of times.
75
76## Evidence Foundation
77
78Keltner & Haidt (2003) defined awe as an emotion with two core features: perceived vastness (the stimulus is larger, more complex, or more powerful than the observer's current frame of reference) and a need for accommodation (the observer's existing mental model cannot account for what they're experiencing, creating a drive to update it). Keltner (2023) expanded this to identify eight categories of awe elicitors: moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spirituality, life and death, and epiphany (sudden understanding). Shiota, Keltner & Mossman (2007) showed that awe reduces the self — the "small self" experience — which decreases self-focus and increases openness to new information. In educational contexts, this means awe can break students out of fixed patterns ("I already know this," "This is boring," "I can't do this") by making them feel part of something larger. Gottlieb, Keltner & Lombrozo (2018) demonstrated that awe functions as a "scientific emotion" — it motivates explanation-seeking, increases curiosity, and promotes deeper processing. Valdesolo & Graham (2014) found that awe increases tolerance for uncertainty — a crucial disposition for learning, which requires being comfortable with not-yet-knowing.
79
80## Input Schema
81
82The teacher must provide:
83- **Lesson content:** What the lesson is about. *e.g. "Year 7 Science: the scale of the universe — understanding the relative sizes and distances of objects in the solar system" / "Year 10 History: the trenches of WW1 — understanding conditions and experiences of soldiers" / "Year 8 Maths: probability — understanding that seemingly random events follow predictable patterns at scale"*
84- **Student level:** Year group. *e.g. "Year 7"*
85
86Optional (injected by context engine if available):
87- **Subject area:** The curriculum subject
88- **Awe trigger:** A specific element to build around
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md2,660 words
Files1
Licencenot declared
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈710
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
3,715
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
2.2%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 22% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

4.4k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Heavy. Teams tend to install this one per project rather than globally, and load it only when the job comes up.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 17.7 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md17.7 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Awe & Wonder Experience Designer · 4.4k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/awe-wonder-experience-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/awe-wonder-experience-designer" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/awe-wonder-experience-designer ] || { mv .claude/skills/awe-wonder-experience-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/awe-wonder-experience-designer" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/awe-wonder-experience-designer"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add garethmanning/awe-wonder-experience-designer

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/awe-wonder-experience-designer/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/awe-wonder-experience-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/awe-wonder-experience-designer" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/awe-wonder-experience-designer ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/awe-wonder-experience-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/awe-wonder-experience-designer" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/awe-wonder-experience-designer" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/awe-wonder-experience-designer/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Version1.0
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencegarethmanning/awe-wonder-experience-designer

Versions

v1.0 is what is on the shelf; no release here carries a date. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

v1.0
  • No earlier releases have been published to the marketplace.
Pinning

The install command always fetches the release that is current the day you run it — v1.0 today — and cannot ask for an earlier one. The copy on your disk does not change until you run it again.

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