Flow State Condition Designer Agent Skill

Optimise a learning activity for flow by balancing challenge level, skill, clear goals, and immediate feedback.

Context cost
4.7k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 18.7 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—v1.0
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Optimise a learning activity for flow by balancing challenge level, skill, clear goals, and immediate feedback. Use when students are bored, anxious, or disengaged during a task.

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.

challenge-skill-balancecsikszentmihalyidocumentationengagementflowoptimal-experience

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.md18.7 kB · preview
--- # AGENT SKILLS STANDARD FIELDS (v2) name: flow-state-condition-designer disable-model-invocation: false user-invocable: true effort: medium # EXISTING FIELDS skill_id: "wellbeing-motivation-agency/flow-state-condition-designer" skill_name: "Flow State Condition Designer" domain: "wellbeing-motivation-agency" version: "1.0" evidence_strength: "moderate" evidence_sources: - "Csikszentmihalyi (1990) — Flow: the psychology of optimal experience" - "Csikszentmihalyi (1997) — Finding Flow: the psychology of engagement with everyday life" - "Shernoff et al. (2003) — Student engagement in high school classrooms from the perspective of flow theory" - "Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi (2002) — The concept of flow: conditions and characteristics" - "Hattie & Donoghue (2016) — Learning strategies: a synthesis and conceptual model" input_schema: required: - field: "lesson_activity" type: "string" - field: "student_level" type: "string" optional: - field: "subject_area" type: "string" - field: "current_engagement" type: "string" - field: "student_profiles" type: "array" - field: "lesson_duration" type: "string" - field: "practical_constraints" type: "string" output_schema: type: "object" fields: - field: "flow_analysis" type: "object" - field: "redesigned_activity" type: "object" - field: "differentiated_challenge" type: "object" - field: "flow_killers" type: "array" chains_well_with: - "motivation-diagnostic-task-redesign" - "perma-based-lesson-designer" - "practice-problem-sequence-designer" - "self-efficacy-builder-sequence" teacher_time: "3 minutes" tags: ["flow", "Csikszentmihalyi", "engagement", "optimal-experience", "challenge-skill-balance"] ---
70# Flow State Condition Designer
71
72## What This Skill Does
73
74Analyses a learning activity against Csikszentmihalyi's flow conditions — challenge-skill balance, clear goals, immediate feedback, sense of control, concentration, and loss of self-consciousness — and redesigns it to maximise the probability of students experiencing flow (deep, absorbed engagement where time seems to disappear and the work itself is rewarding). The critical insight is that flow is not random — it occurs when specific conditions are met, and teachers can deliberately engineer these conditions. The output includes an analysis of which flow conditions the current activity meets or misses, a redesigned version optimised for flow, differentiated challenge calibration (because flow requires a PERSONAL challenge-skill match, not a class-level one), and a list of common classroom practices that destroy flow. AI is specifically valuable here because achieving flow in a classroom requires balancing individual challenge-skill ratios across 30 students simultaneously — a design challenge that benefits from systematic analysis.
75
76## Evidence Foundation
77
78Csikszentmihalyi (1990, 1997) identified flow as the state of optimal experience — the state in which people are so absorbed in what they're doing that nothing else seems to matter. He identified eight conditions for flow: (1) clear goals, (2) immediate feedback, (3) challenge-skill balance (the task is just beyond the person's current ability — not too easy, not too hard), (4) concentration and focused attention, (5) sense of control over the activity, (6) loss of self-consciousness, (7) transformation of time (time seems to fly), and (8) the activity becomes autotelic (rewarding in itself). Shernoff et al. (2003) applied flow theory to high school classrooms and found that flow experiences predicted academic engagement, achievement, and wellbeing. Students reported the highest engagement when challenge and skill were both high — boredom occurred when challenge was low (even if skill was high), and anxiety occurred when challenge was high but skill was low. The "flow channel" is the narrow band where challenge and skill are matched. Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi (2002) elaborated that flow experiences build over time into "vital engagement" — a sustained relationship with the activity that goes beyond momentary absorption. Hattie & Donoghue (2016) confirmed that matching learning strategies to the student's current stage — surface strategies for early learning, deep strategies for later — is essential for maintaining the challenge-skill balance that flow requires.
79
80## Input Schema
81
82The teacher must provide:
83- **Lesson activity:** What students are doing. *e.g. "Students complete a worksheet of 20 algebra questions" / "Students write a creative story based on a stimulus image" / "Students conduct a chemistry experiment following a step-by-step method sheet"*
84- **Student level:** Year group. *e.g. "Year 9"*
85
86Optional (injected by context engine if available):
87- **Subject area:** The curriculum subject
88- **Current engagement:** How engaged students are
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md2,760 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.

≈730
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
3,945
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
2.3%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 23% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

4.7k 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, 18.7 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md18.7 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.

# Flow State Condition Designer · 4.7k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/flow-state-condition-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/flow-state-condition-designer" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/flow-state-condition-designer ] || { mv .claude/skills/flow-state-condition-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/flow-state-condition-designer" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/flow-state-condition-designer"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add garethmanning/flow-state-condition-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/flow-state-condition-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/flow-state-condition-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/flow-state-condition-designer" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/flow-state-condition-designer ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/flow-state-condition-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/flow-state-condition-designer" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/flow-state-condition-designer" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/flow-state-condition-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/flow-state-condition-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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