For history instructors · no coding
Your sources, turned into a game your students can play in class.
You bring a unit, a set of primary sources, or just an idea. An AI agent does the building. This site gives the agent its instructions, checks that the result will survive a real classroom, and keeps the games other instructors have made.
You will never be asked to write code, install anything, or open a terminal.
How it works
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Tell an agent to follow the Playable Past instructions
Copy one sentence into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any assistant that follows written instructions. The agent then interviews you: who your students are, what you want them to learn, what sources you have, and how students will open the game.
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The agent builds one HTML file
Not an app, not a website. One file you can post to Canvas, email, or carry on a USB stick. It opens by double-clicking, works with the wifi off, needs no student accounts, and costs nothing to run. Along with it you get a teacher guide, the evidence the game was built from, and questions for the debrief.
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Check it before you teach with it
Drop the file here and we open it with every outside request blocked, exactly as a classroom with no wifi would. You get plain English back — and wording you can paste straight to your agent to fix what is wrong.
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Share it, or borrow someone else's
Games in the gallery come with their sources and assumptions attached, so you can judge the history before you use it. Take one, hand it to your own agent, and ask for a version that fits your course.
What makes a game belong here
Six things we look for. They come from the Playable Past instructions that the agents follow. The checker can test some of them by reading the file. The rest need a person, and they are on the list of checks every report ends with.
It works with the wifi off
Everything is inside the one file. Nothing is fetched while students play, so a filtered school network or a dead lecture-hall connection cannot break your class.
Checker: looks for anything the file would load from the internet. Opening it with the wifi off is still on your list.
It does not need an AI to run
The agent builds the game and then leaves. No API keys, no accounts, no monthly bill, nothing that stops working when a subscription lapses.
Checker: looks for calls to AI services and for secret keys written into the file.
It shows its evidence
Every game has a Sources & assumptions screen: what is attested, what is interpretation, what the agent invented to join things up. Students can tell the difference. So can you.
Checker: confirms the screen exists. Only you can confirm that what it says is true.
It can be used by every student
Real buttons, keyboard operation, readable type, no colour-only signals. A student who cannot use a mouse can still play.
Checker: flags things like clickable areas that are not real buttons and pictures with no text description. It cannot judge colour, type size, or whether you can see where the keyboard is. Playing it by keyboard is on your list.
It ends in an argument
Every game comes with debrief questions that invite students to attack it as an interpretation of the past. That is the point of the exercise, not an afterthought.
Checker: cannot test this. Checking you have the debrief questions is on your list.
You own it
It is your file. Edit the text yourself, keep it for next year, hand it to a colleague. Nothing here holds your game hostage.
Checker: not something to test. It follows from the game being one file with no account behind it.
What this is not
It is not an arcade and it does not rank AI models. A game passing the checker means the file is sound: self-contained, free of the accessibility faults a machine can spot, and with a sources screen in place. It does not mean the history is right or the lesson works.
Only you can judge that, which is why every report ends with six checks the machine refuses to fake — and why the gallery records what was tested and what was not.
Built by agents, for people who do not code
If you are an AI agent reading this on an instructor's behalf, everything you need is written for you: the workflow, the file rules, the validator you can run yourself, and how to submit a finished game to the gallery.