Hi Peter,
A child theme is just an extension of an existing WordPress theme. It’s a way to add or change functionality/design in a theme while still allowing the parent theme to be upgraded in the future. It doesn’t promise that none of the changes won’t need to be altered after the parent is updated. It just preserves the changes and hopefully keeps them working after the parent is updated. Does that make sense?
You’re welcome to make one for your site and incorporate your educational resources there. It’ll require some coding to make that happen. There is an ebook called Digging Into WordPress (http://digwp.com) that you might find helpful if you want to go that route.
If I was in this spot, I don’t know that I would make a child theme to create what you’re looking for here. You could even use a page building plugin like SiteOrigin Page Builder to create the layout and then add in lists of posts based on categories into the layout. You could easily recreate the topics page from A List Apart that way and it wouldn’t require any coding. I use that plugin on my own store and have been really happy with it.
The bottom line is you can create a child theme with a page template that makes your lists, or you can use a plugin like Page Builder to make it for you. Either way works, one is just quite a bit easier and faster than the other.
If you have any questions, let me know,
Bill