How the map was built
The pipeline, the numbers, and the honest limitations — so you can judge for yourself how much weight to put on any alignment.
The skills and their connections
The skills come from the open Marble Skill Taxonomy (© Generative Spark, Inc., CC BY-SA 4.0 / ODbL 1.0): 1,590 topics across 8 subjects and 54 domains, connected by 3,221 prerequisite links. Each link is typed — hard (must come first) or soft (helps) — and carries a written reason. Each skill carries a plain-English description, evidence of mastery, an assessment prompt and a typical age range. We render this data as-is; we don’t edit skills or connections.
The Australian Curriculum data
No machine-readable version of the Australian Curriculum v9 F–6 content descriptions existed, so we made one: all 614 content descriptions (Foundation to Year 6) parsed from ACARA’s official DOCX files, with code, learning area, strand, year level and full text (© ACARA, CC BY 4.0) — English 189, Mathematics 139, HASS 84, Science 77, Health & Physical Education 59, Digital Technologies 38, Design & Technologies 28. One parsing bug — dropped fraction glyphs in AC9M3N02 — was found and fixed against the official source; a sweep confirmed it was the only affected record. The dataset lives at github.com/curiousape-ai/acara-v9-f6-json and is downloadable here.
One version note: the candidate alignments below were computed against the 475-record v0.1 parse of this dataset. The 139 sub-strand descriptions added in the current 614-record set have no candidate matches yet — their pages simply show the official text. A v0.2 re-match against the full set is planned.
The matching
Each Marble skill was matched to candidate curriculum codes by semantic similarity: a sentence-transformer model (all-MiniLM-L6-v2) over skill and code descriptions, boosted by exact-term TF-IDF, and constrained so matches stay within a compatible subject and a plausible year range (age ≈ year + 5, ±1 year). The same pipeline ran against 164 NSW syllabus outcome codes across the five K–6 syllabuses.
Every match gets a confidence band from its similarity score: high (score ≥ ~0.62–0.66 depending on subject), medium (≥ ~0.50–0.53) and low (≥ ~0.40–0.42). Below that, no match is shown. The bands are honest about uncertainty — a “low” match is a lead worth checking, not a mapping.
The numbers
| Australian Curriculum v9 (F–6) | NSW syllabuses (K–6) | |
|---|---|---|
| Skills with candidate matches | 1,007 of 1,590 | 795 of 1,590 |
| — best match high confidence | 233 | 183 |
| — best match medium confidence | 461 | 350 |
| — best match low confidence | 313 | 262 |
| No F–6 / K–6 match | 445 | 657 |
| Beyond Year 6 | 120 | 120 |
| General capabilities | 18 | 18 |
Unmatched skills are often finer-grained than the curriculum describes, sit beyond Year 6, or align to ACARA’s General Capabilities rather than a learning area. Their pages say so honestly.
The limitations
- Every alignment is a candidate — machine-suggested and unreviewed (v0.1). None has been verified by a teacher or curriculum authority. Never rely on them for registration or compliance.
- Semantic matching rewards similar wording; it can miss conceptually equivalent pairs phrased differently, and over-match superficially similar ones.
- Ages on the map are the taxonomy’s typical ranges, not Australian year-level prescriptions.
- NSW outcome descriptions aren’t reproduced here (they’re not openly licensed), so NSW matches show codes and stage labels only — always read the official outcome at curriculum.nsw.edu.au before acting on a match.
What’s next
A community review workflow is planned: reviewed matches will graduate from “candidate” to “community-reviewed” in a future dataset version. The scores in v0.1 stay frozen — this site renders the data, it never re-matches.
Want the raw material? Everything is on the data page, openly licensed.