Step one
Copy this into your AI assistant.
That is the whole setup. Any assistant that follows written instructions will do — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or a model running on your own machine.
Follow the instructions at this link to help me build a game for my history course: https://gist.github.com/kltng/2a2b26a8817540531f3191412c308276 I am not a programmer. Please interview me first, a few questions at a time.
The second line matters. Without it some assistants start writing code before they know who your students are.
What happens next
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It asks you questions
Who your students are. What you want them to learn — not the topic, the question. What sources you have. How long the session is. And the one that decides everything: how will students open the game?
Answer in ordinary language. "Second-year undergraduates, fifty minutes, they have laptops, I want them to see why the negotiation failed" is a complete answer.
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It reads your sources like a historian
It builds an inventory of what you gave it and a ledger that marks every fact as attested, interpretation, assumption, or invention. You will be shown this. Correct it now — it is far cheaper than correcting the finished game.
Watch for anything marked model recall. That is the agent working from its own memory rather than your material, and it is the part most likely to be wrong.
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It proposes three sizes and builds the smallest
A minimum version, a recommended version, and an ambitious one. It should build the minimum first. If it promises a large simulation in one sitting, ask it to scale down.
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You get a file and the paperwork
One HTML file, a one-page teacher guide, the evidence it was built from, debrief questions, and an honest list of what it could not test.
Then run it through the checker before you teach with it.
Things worth saying to your agent
If it cannot open links
Some chat tools cannot browse. Open the
gist yourself, copy the text of
0-playable-past.md into the chat, and paste the other files when the agent
asks for them by name.
If it starts coding too early
Say: "Stop. Answer the deployment question first, then interview me." A game that cannot reach your students is a wasted afternoon, however good it is.
If it says a check passed
Ask: "Did you actually run that, or are you inferring it?" The workflow forbids claiming an untested check passed. Most assistants cannot open a browser and play your game.
If you want to continue later
Ask for project-state.md and keep the documents it produced. Any assistant
can pick the work up from those — you are not locked to the one you started with.
If your class is not in English
Say so. The instructions are in English, but the game should be in the language your students learn in. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and other scripts are expected, not an edge case.
If the material is painful
Tell the agent how you normally frame it in class and ask it to follow your lead. It is instructed never to award points for suffering.
Plan a few days ahead
Not the night before. Building takes a conversation; the part that catches real problems is opening the finished file once on the actual classroom computer. Five minutes then saves the class.