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Welcome to the Friday edition of our newsletter. We spend Fridays going deeper into tools and trends related to generative AI (and Tuesdays sharing news updates).
Our students vibe-coded puzzle games
TL;DR: Play the games and vote for your favorite
The goal in our Gen AI class last week at Drake University was fairly simple. We wanted to make one of our students a millionaire.
Their assignment was to brainstorm ideas, build and test prototypes, and ultimately “vibe code” a daily puzzle game in the style of New York Times Games and LinkedIn Puzzles. And since the Times paid seven figures for Wordle, millionaire status was (and still is) definitely on the table.
We did this same assignment in last year’s class, but vibe coding was still in its infancy then. Students were lucky to get their games to work. A year later, the tools have advanced to the point where students only limitations appeared to be their imaginations.
Read on below to learn about vibe coding and play our students games.
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What is vibe coding?
You don't have to know how to code anymore to build software. That's the basic idea behind vibe coding.
The term was coined last year by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy. The idea: you describe what you want to build in plain language, an AI writes the code, and you keep prompting until it works. You don't read the code. You don't really understand the code. You just... vibe with it until it does what you need.
Our students used (mostly) Gemini Canvas, Lovable and Claude Artifacts to vibe code their games.
What was the assignment?
Here's how the assignment worked. Groups started by playing LinkedIn's daily puzzle games and NY Times games like Wordle and Connections. The goal was simple: figure out what makes these things so addictive. Short sessions. A daily reset. Something you can share with your friends.
From there, they brainstormed (using AI to help) 10 original game concepts – thinking about each one’s core mechanic, how long it takes to play, what keeps people coming back, and how hard it would be to build.
Then came the fun part. They picked their two best ideas and built working prototypes using vibe coding. Not mockups. Actual playable games.
After playtesting prototypes with classmates, students chose their strongest concept and polished it into a final game with on-screen instructions, a daily puzzle mechanic, and a shareable result – the kind of score or emoji grid you'd want to post.
Where do I play the games?
We, of course, vibe coded a website where users can view and play all of the students puzzle games.
Check out the site. Play the games. And if you have a favorite, vote for it here.
And if you’re so impressed by a game you want to meet the students who made it, reach out to us. We’re happy to make an introduction.
