Redesign the pathway builder: warm, cohesive visual identity + better streaming flow

[adamstankiewicz]

Summary

A full visual and structural redesign of the teacher-facing pathway builder (/), bringing it up to the same warm, playful identity /learn already established for students — while keeping the calm, professional register a teacher's workspace needs.

• Intake: topic is now the single focused first question; grade, submit, and the specificity hint reveal progressively once a topic exists; the optional teacher-note field moved behind a real + Add detail disclosure instead of always being visible.
• Visual identity: adopted /learn's violet/pink/amber palette, spring motion (motion/react), and pressed-button physicality for primary CTAs — as an ambient wash rather than full-bleed saturation, since this page is read for minutes, not tapped through once. Added Lexend as a second, purpose-grounded display typeface (research-backed for reading proficiency), scoped locally to this page only.
• Streaming flow: the document now renders as a skeleton the instant a teacher submits, filling in section by section as events arrive — outcomes and steps hold their place with skeletons so anchor-derived sections (prior knowledge, also touches) never appear out of backward-design order. The progress indicator is a segmented strip with live stage copy instead of an always-open technical log.
• "The pathway" thread: steps are a genuine ordered sequence, so they're now connected by a real vertical thread with a color-matched waypoint dot per step — the one structural signature device this page earns, not decoration. Color is concentrated at the dot and the step's pill badge only; card borders and the connecting line stay neutral to avoid redundant signal.
• Pending-step loading state: shows a centered, stage-colored icon and specific copy naming the actual widget kind coming ("Building a swipe activity…") instead of a generic grey box, using widgetKind which is already known before the spec arrives.
• Completion: replaced the quiet collapsed-accordion-plus-separate-box with one connected "Pathway ready" celebration strip (steps built · standard matched · time, plus a lightweight emoji-burst), with the share link folded in as the primary CTA.
• Restyled AssignToStudents and LessonPlanUpload to match, without touching their logic.
• Merged main twice along the way (upload folded back into the builder, then lesson-plan excerpts shaping generation) and adapted both to the new design.

Known follow-up

main has since added already-assigned-student tracking and a parentSessionId prop to AssignToStudents.tsx (not in this branch yet) — that file will show a merge conflict against current main and needs one more fold-in pass before merging. Everything else here is clean against main as of this PR.

Test plan

• tsc --noEmit, eslint, and next build all clean
• Full generation run exercised in-browser (Playwright) in both light and dark mode: intake → streaming skeleton → step thread → pending states → completion celebration
• Verified existing functionality intact: click-to-edit, step regeneration, Stop mid-stream, upload → topic chips → auto-fill, ShareLink copy + stats, roster assignment
• Not tested: the main-side already-assigned-student flow (post-dates this branch, see Known follow-up)

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
interactive-learning-experiences	Error		Aug 15, 2026 6:40pm