Week 2 · September 3 · 50 minutes left

Today you are the machine.

No computers again. By the end of the hour you will know what we are all building toward.

Scope small, finish strong.

AI is your assistant, not your author. You decide.

47 left · What just happened

You didn’t know it. You’d heard it a lot.

That’s what an LLM does, with the whole internet.

Key word

LLM — large language model: The kind of AI that works with words. It read an enormous amount of what people have written, and it guesses what word probably comes next. That is the whole trick. It is not looking anything up.

36 left · Same four words. Vote again after each one.

Nobody changed the words. The context did all the work.

Context	The question is still “In the beginning ___”
No context	Whatever you wrote down.
Someone studying the Bible	Vote again.
Someone studying the New Testament	Vote again.
Someone studying the Gospel of John	Vote again.

Everybody changed their answer anyway.

Key word

Context: Everything the AI can see about your situation when it answers. It only knows what you put in front of it. Change the context and the same question gets a different answer.

36 left · What just happened

Same words. Different context. Different answer.

The AI can’t see your context unless you give it to it.

You picked the most common one. So does it. That’s bias.

Key word

Bias: The AI shows you more of what it saw most. It is not the AI having an opinion — ask for “a hero” and you get the same picture over and over, because that is what was most common in everything it read.

20 left · Next week, with the engine open

It doesn’t know your game.

Not your art style. Not your theme. Not what you already built. Type a prompt asking for a sprite and it is doing “In the beginning” with no context.

Give it context, or it gives you the average.

AI is your assistant, not your author. You decide.

Key word

Prompt: What you type to tell an AI what you want. A vague prompt gets you the average answer — the context you add is what makes the answer yours.

20 left · One rule that never changes

No personal information goes into any AI tool.

Not your name

Not where you live or go to school

Not your family — or anyone else’s

12 left · The theme for every game this semester

Sanctified.

Every game in this room is built on that one word. It is not up for a vote, and that is on purpose – a limit is where ideas start.

Key word

Sanctified: Set apart, made clean, and given a purpose. Something ordinary that gets picked out, cleaned up, and handed a job that matters.

12 left · Four ways in. Pick one.

Set apart

Something is picked out from everything else because it is for a purpose.

sort · choose · protect · keep out

Made clean

Something was ruined, and you bring it back.

clean · repair · restore · rescue

Given a purpose

An ordinary thing gets a new job it was never built for.

build · deliver · rebuild · re-use

Being made

Not one moment. Slow change, and only if you keep coming back.

grow · tend · return · keep

Nobody gets the wrong one. Four people can pick the same lens and still build four different games.

12 left · Grades 6–12 · One more, and it is yours to choose

Pick a verse. Any verse.

Open your Bible and hunt for one. A single verse, or two or three if the sentence runs over. It becomes a second limit on your game, and a place to go when you are stuck.

“Jesus wept.”

John 11:35

“The Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.”

Jonah 1:17

“The Lord God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head.”

Jonah 4:6

“It is finished.”

John 19:30

Key word

Verse as a constraint: A rule you give yourself on purpose to make your game more creative, not less. One verse, found by you. It does not have to appear in the game. It has to shape it – the mood, the mechanic, the ending, or what the player is trying to do.

12 left · Now make it into a game

Pick a lens. Pick a verb. What game is that?

Lens

Verb

5 left · Write it down before you lose it

What caught your attention today that we didn’t finish?

What do you want to try when the engine opens next week?

Keep the page. It goes in your folder, and it is the first thing you read next week.

Today you are the machine.

So:

Missing one is the most useful thing anybody has done today.

In the beginning ______

Nobody changed the words. The context did all the work.

Everybody changed their answer anyway.

You picked the most common one. So does it. That’s bias.

It doesn’t know your game.

No personal information goes into any AI tool.

Sanctified.

Nobody gets the wrong one. Four people can pick the same lens and still build four different games.

Pick a verse. Any verse.

We open the engine.