Skill-based minigame curriculum · indirect control · tip-referenced feedback

The drills — learning angle, fit & contact

Each drill isolates one sub-skill and teaches it through an indirect linkage: you never aim the contact tip directly — you drive a kinematic chain and learn how it translates your input into the tip's pose. All feedback is tip-referenced; the target is hidden but inferable from a warmer/colder signal; failure is decomposed so you know why you missed. Built to the spec in docs/plans/2026-08-18-skill-minigames-spec.md.

Foundations
Drill I

Dock — orientation

Approach vector

Match the tip's heading to a hidden target direction. Includes the swap challenge: lock the same hidden angle under two different linkages (Arm & Body) to prove you learned the angle, not a drag-macro.

✓ built · dual-lock
Drill II

The Curl — hooked approach

Approach vector (curved)

One rung above Dock. The winning approach isn't straight — it hooks. Match the tip's end-tangent to a curled "come-hither" target at a fixed depth. Dock = straight vector; Curl = curved vector.

✓ built
Contact quality
Drill III

Tangent — glancing contact

Indirect contact

Direct center-hits overshoot and score negative. Reward comes from off-axis, glancing contact in a mid-incidence band. Teaches the counterintuitive lesson: more direct ≠ better.

✓ built
Drill IV

Contact — depth & pressure

Depth + pressure

A compliance spring decouples two skills: depth (where along the vector) and pressure (how hard, past first contact). Be at the right depth with too little pressure — or jam pressure at the wrong depth — and you miss.

✓ built
Spatial routing
Drill V

Fit — routing

Fit

Constraint-limited joints and obstacles. The target is only reachable by routing the chain through its available degrees of freedom — a straight reach fails. The only drill that teaches fit.

✓ built
Skill checks
Finale · first pass

Composite — Dock + Tangent + drift

Composite · all three uncertainty sources

Fuses the two strongest drills and adds within-run drift — the target moves as you hold, so re-aiming is the lesson. Three uncertainty sources at once, earned: by now you can decompose your own error.

✓ built
Finale · full

Full composite — everything

Composite · folds in Fit + Contact

The complete skill check once every drill is proven solo: vector, curl, glancing contact, depth, pressure, and routing under drift.

✓ built
Why indirect control? Aiming the tip directly would train reflexes, not spatial intuition. By putting a learnable linkage between your input and the tip — and keeping the same hidden targets across different linkages — the only thing stable enough to learn is the target geometry itself. That's the transfer mechanism (variable practice), and it's why every drill shares the same feedback and lock machinery.

Interactive & animated views