Experience Layer (Capa de Experiencia)
What this is. A cross-cutting design layer, declared at every altitude — Learning Program, Learning Experience, Learning Unit (Programa, Experiencia, Unidad de Aprendizaje), Activity, Content — orthogonal to the six Learning Task Types (Tipos de Tarea de Aprendizaje) and never scored. It names five aspects that technically correct instructional design usually leaves implicit: the wonder that makes someone look up, the hook that turns that attention into sustained voluntary effort, play as a legitimate form of wanted difficulty, the disruption that forces a decision to be made again, and the horizon that shows who the person who is learning can become.
What it adds. Smoother already had almost all of these materials — Hooks, Matization, Closings, Impossible and Fantastic Scenarios, Riddles and Puzzles, the Motivating Structure, the Disruption of the Challenges, the Inspire stage of the CEMI Impact Arc (Arco de Impacto CEMI) — but it had them one altitude too low and entirely optional. A Learning Program could be fully compliant without any part of its declared structure saying how it was going to capture, sustain or expand the attention of the person taking part. The Layer invents no instruments: it raises the altitude, names the fields and makes them countable.
Origin, stated honestly. It was written for the first time in September 2026, while designing Smoother’s first Learning Program whose participants are adolescents. That context made the gap visible: for a professional person relevance comes given; for a sixteen-year-old in a compulsory classroom it has to be manufactured, every week. But the gap is not that age’s: it is the whole method’s. The Layer is general and applies to all nineteen modalities.
What it is NOT: a seventh Task Type
Four reasons, in order of force. Category error: the six Task Types answer what cognitive work is the person who is learning doing?; the five aspects answer a different question — under what conditions is that person willing and able to do that work, and what does having done it open up for them? “Wonder” is not something one does. It would break the routers, which score the six Task Types against structure, modality, content type and position in the sequence: five Task Types without a cognitive verb would produce junk affinities. It would break the rubric, which anchors each row to a component of the Learning Object (Objeto de Aprendizaje): there is no honest row for was this wonderful?, and writing it would turn engagement into a grade. And the right precedent already exists and is orthogonal: the CEMI Impact Arc runs through the structure instead of adding a box to it. That shape is copied.
The five aspects
| Name (EN · ES · FR) | In one line | What the person designing writes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| E1 | Wonder · Asombro · Émerveillement | The initial gap in the ordinary that makes someone look up. | A named Hook, or an Impossible or Fantastic Scenario, written out in full, together with the sentence it means to provoke. At least one per Learning Unit. |
| E2 | Hook · Enganche · Accroche | The named reason this person has to keep working once the wonder wears off. | The declared motivational mechanism, from a closed list, plus the choice actually offered. If nothing is chosen, the field says so. |
| E3 | Play · Juego · Jeu | Voluntary, low-risk, rule-governed activity whose difficulty is the fun. | The form of play, the rule that creates the difficulty, and the A5 test answered in writing. |
| E4 | Disruption · Perturbación · Perturbation | A planned change of conditions, delivered live halfway through the experience, that invalidates part of the plan. | What it is, when it is delivered, what it invalidates, what it forces to be decided again, and its stopping rule written down. A budget, not a requirement: at most one per Learning Experience — an expected disruption is no longer one. |
| E5 | Horizon · Horizonte · Horizon | The concrete and reachable image of who the person taking part can become. | A real, named person, work or trajectory outside the classroom, plus the first step they can take without asking permission, which is a mandatory field. |
The names of origin, as Carlos Miranda Levy formulated them, are Magic · Motivation · Fun and Entertainment · Adaptability to the Unexpected · Inspiration for Aspiration; they are recorded as provenance. “Motivation” was renamed Hook (Enganche) for a structural reason: the word is already taken by the General Learning Definition (Definición General del Aprendizaje), and reusing it would produce the two-vocabularies failure. The five forms in Spanish, English and French are canonical and are not re-translated for the convenience of an artifact.
Three invariants
- I1 — Never scored. No field enters a rubric row, a grade or an advancement decision. It is a design declaration, audited at design time and reviewed after delivery.
- I2 — Declared, and then measured locally. Each field is evidence of intention, never of effect. Effect is measured by the Learning Facilitator (Orientador de Aprendizaje — the role that accompanies the process) per group and per cohort; it is never assumed from the declaration.
- I3 — Subordinate to the Guiding Position. The Layer exists so that the person does the cognitive work, never to substitute for it. Where a choice of the Layer and a pedagogical foundation come into conflict, the foundation wins and the conflict is written down. “Smoother does not mean frictionless” governs this layer too.
The countable floor
In this method only what is counted gets built. Each Learning Unit declares asombro (wonder) — about the Unit’s concept, never adjacent to it — and enganche (hook). Each Learning Experience declares horizonte (horizon) with its mandatory first step without permission, and at most one perturbacion (disruption), which is not declared without its stopping rule. And juego (play) appears at least once per Learning Experience, with its A5 test in writing.
The A5 test, literally: what is the person taking part practicing while they play, and would removing the play remove the learning or only the appetite? Both answers are admissible — appetite is a legitimate design objective — but the answer is written down, so that a year later it can be read and judged. That is the whole difference between design and decoration.
What does not change
The Layer is additive and orthogonal; that is its entire claim. Nothing changes because of it: not the six Task Types, not the eight Unit Structures, not the eight-component Learning Object, not the routers, not the evaluation model — a rubric anchored to the Learning Object, a multi-component profile, never a single grade — nor the nineteen modalities. If a proposal from the Layer required changing any of those, it would be the wrong proposal.
Evidence
Level: Original / design position. A Smoother design position, authored by Carlos Miranda Levy. It is conviction and practice, never validated pedagogy. It sits in the same register as the Guiding Position “The Almighty Gym” and as the CEMI Impact Arc — also authored by him, adopted by CEMI as a group — and it submits to the same discipline as the Pashler posture of the Personal Preferences: it declares what it is and borrows no authority from neighboring literatures.
The Layer was deliberately put through a research round run to refute it wherever it was refutable. Its label did not change. What changed is the honesty of the detail: two of the five aspects — Wonder (Asombro) and Play (Juego) — are additionally labeled with no convergences, because the literature that would judge them does not exist in the age band they were written for; saying so is the point, not the accident. No convergence licenses an aspect: at most it reinforces the instrument of our own that already existed.
Permitted wording: “a Smoother design position, authored by Carlos Miranda Levy” · “aligns with” · “converges with” · “is consistent with” · “this is our bet, and we label it as such”. Prohibited wording: “evidence-based” · “derived from” · “proven by” · “proven method” · “the research shows that wonder improves learning” · presenting any of the five aspects, or the layer as a whole, as a research finding.
Related
Elements of Materials · Learning Activities · Scenarios · Riddles and Puzzles · Learning Units · Learning Tasks · Artificial Intelligence in Learning · Evaluation · Discovery · Memory and Learning · Personal Preferences · Challenges · Onboarding
Source
protocol/smoother-capa-de-experiencia.md — state of 2026-09-17 (open section of the CHANGELOG, after 0.40.0).