An Obsidian-First Markdown Pedagogical Path for Vietnamese 14+ Learners and Educators: Curriculum Specification for Document Engineering Volume 2

Document Engineering Vol 2 teaches Markdown to Vietnamese learners aged 14+ and to educators building personal lesson libraries. The dominant Vietnamese-language tutorial pattern — observed across VnExpress, Tinhte, Viblo, kipalog, and the Vietnamese sub-corpus of the official Obsidian forum — treats Markdown as a syntax cheatsheet first, then introduces editor or rendering tools. This developer-first sequence (markdownsyntax > obsidian-features) is structurally appropriate for software developers who already maintain text files in versioncontrolled repositories, but it is mis-fit for an audience whose native artefact is a personal note collection rather than a sourcecode base. This paper specifies a vault-first sequence (vault > note > tag > graph > syntax-on-demand) anchored on Obsidian's vault model, organised around personal knowledge management (PKM) primitives drawn from Forte's PARA, Allosso's educator Zettelkasten, and Ahrens's Smart Notes, and disciplined by Bjork desirable-difficulty, Mayer multimedia, and Sweller-Paas-Renkl cognitive-load theory. Markdown syntax is taught on demand, in three short chapters distributed across the curriculum rather than as a front-loaded reference. The curriculum is sequenceable in 13 chapters with a per-chapter intrinsic-load budget of three to five named constructs, learning objective, prerequisite, exercise pattern, common misconception, and reflection prompt. The deliverable is a curriculum specification, not an empirical validation; per the elix-researches no-cohort scope pivot, no human-subject testing is in scope. A worked example follows a Grade-11 Vietnamese learner from blank vault to defended-withcitations science-fair project. The contribution is the explicit ordering rule — vault and notes precede syntax; graph and tags precede folders; on-demand syntax precedes plugins — that discriminates a learner-PKM curriculum from a developersyntax curriculum, plus an educator adaptation that reuses the same vault model for a single teacher's lesson library without escalating to a school-wide content management system.