Dual Coding Designer Agent Skill

Design a visual complement to verbal content using dual coding principles for stronger encoding.

Context cost
4.8k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 19.2 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 visual complement to verbal content using dual coding principles for stronger encoding. Use when creating slides, diagrams, posters, or visual explanations of complex concepts.

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.

cognitive-loaddiagramsdocumentationdual-codingmultimediavisual-representation

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.md19.2 kB · preview
--- # AGENT SKILLS STANDARD FIELDS (v2) name: dual-coding-designer disable-model-invocation: false user-invocable: true effort: medium # EXISTING FIELDS skill_id: "memory-learning-science/dual-coding-designer" skill_name: "Dual Coding Designer" domain: "memory-learning-science" version: "1.0" evidence_strength: "strong" evidence_sources: - "Paivio (1986) — Mental Representations: A Dual Coding Approach" - "Clark & Paivio (1991) — Dual coding theory and education" - "Mayer (2009) — Multimedia learning: second edition (multimedia principle and related principles)" - "Mayer & Moreno (2003) — Nine ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning" - "Caviglioli (2019) — Dual Coding with Teachers (practical application of the research)" input_schema: required: - field: "verbal_content" type: "string" - field: "subject_and_level" type: "string" optional: - field: "visual_constraints" type: "string" - field: "student_profiles" type: "array" - field: "existing_visuals" type: "string" output_schema: type: "object" fields: - field: "visual_design" type: "object" - field: "integration_notes" type: "string" - field: "annotation_strategy" type: "string" - field: "common_pitfalls" type: "array" chains_well_with: - "cognitive-load-analyser" - "worked-example-fading-designer" - "text-complexity-analyser" - "explicit-instruction-sequence-builder" teacher_time: "4 minutes" tags: ["dual-coding", "visual-representation", "multimedia", "cognitive-load", "diagrams"] ---
64# Dual Coding Designer
65
66## What This Skill Does
67
68Takes a verbal explanation or concept and designs a complementary visual representation — specifying the diagram type, spatial layout, labelling strategy, and annotation approach that best supports understanding. This is NOT about making content "more visual" or appealing to "visual learners" (a debunked concept). It is about exploiting the well-established finding that processing information through both verbal and visual channels simultaneously creates stronger, more retrievable memory traces than either channel alone. AI is specifically valuable here because selecting the right visual representation for a concept requires understanding both the structure of the knowledge (sequential? hierarchical? causal? spatial?) and the principles of multimedia learning — most teachers default to decorative images or overly complex diagrams that increase cognitive load rather than reducing it.
69
70## Evidence Foundation
71
72Paivio's (1986) dual coding theory established that human cognition operates through two distinct channels — verbal (language-based) and non-verbal (image-based) — and that information encoded through both channels is more readily retrieved than information encoded through one channel alone. Clark & Paivio (1991) applied this to education, demonstrating that complementary verbal and visual representations improve learning outcomes. Mayer (2009) operationalised dual coding into twelve multimedia learning principles, including the multimedia principle (people learn better from words and pictures than words alone), the contiguity principle (words and pictures should be presented together, not separated), and the coherence principle (extraneous visual material harms learning). Mayer & Moreno (2003) identified nine specific ways to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning, including eliminating seductive details (interesting but irrelevant images), using spatial contiguity (placing text near the corresponding visual element), and signalling (using visual cues to direct attention). **Critical distinction:** Dual coding is about *complementary* representations — the visual shows something the words cannot efficiently convey (spatial relationships, processes, hierarchies). It is NOT about matching content to a student's "preferred learning style," which is debunked (Pashler et al., 2008). Every learner benefits from well-designed dual coding regardless of any supposed style preference.
73
74## Input Schema
75
76The teacher must provide:
77- **Verbal content:** The explanation or concept that needs a visual complement. *e.g. "The process of osmosis: water molecules move from an area of high water concentration to low water concentration across a semi-permeable membrane" / "The causes of World War I can be grouped into long-term, short-term, and trigger causes"*
78- **Subject and level:** Subject area and year group. *e.g. "Year 9 Biology" / "Year 11 History"*
79
80Optional (injected by context engine if available):
81- **Visual constraints:** Format restrictions. *e.g. "Must be drawable on a whiteboard in under 2 minutes" / "For a printed worksheet"*
82- **Student profiles:** Language proficiency levels, visual processing needs
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md2,676 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.

≈660
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
4,140
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
2.4%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 24% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

4.8k 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, 19.2 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md19.2 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.

# Dual Coding Designer · 4.8k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/garethmanning-dual-coding-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/dual-coding-designer" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/dual-coding-designer ] || { mv .claude/skills/dual-coding-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/dual-coding-designer" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/dual-coding-designer"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add garethmanning/dual-coding-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/dual-coding-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/garethmanning-dual-coding-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/dual-coding-designer" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/dual-coding-designer ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/dual-coding-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/dual-coding-designer" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/dual-coding-designer" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/dual-coding-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/dual-coding-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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