One of the use cases for AI is to help you create computer programs you otherwise aren’t talented enough to write on your own. In this case, I had an idea for an experience that would help a student gauge their thinking around visiting a school.
Goals:
- Develop a Choose-Your-Own Adventure style experience for a pre-educator to consider their decision making when visiting an elementary school
- Give students realistic scenarios where they can be tested about their professional decision making and interpersonal relationships with students
- Use AI to create the experience and rate the student answers in a realistic context
What I came up with was the scenario for Willow Glen Elementary, a fictitious school. The HTML file is pure HTML, Javascript, and CSS and therefore can live on a server or be run locally.
The student gets to make choices about visiting classrooms and the answers they choose change local variables in the Javascript which relate to the later debrief with the principal.
In the Fall of 2026, I put this experience in front of students to gauge feedback and to see how interested future educators may be in building something similar with the help of AI. In my case, I used Claude.
How to Construct Something Similar
I was first interested in this idea of interactive text games that were popular during my childhood, such as Zork. There are several styles of these types of text/story/game hybrids. Some of these go by the names of Twine or Sugarcube. While I think there is a legitimate case to be made for creating stories for instructional purposes, and pushing these into interactive models, I wanted to develop a proof-of-concept.
Willow Glen is short by design. I started by talking to Claude about developing a Sugarcube style story but then instead of creating something that would become published on a third-party website, I wanted something self-contained. I therefore asked Claude to create the environment for me.
I then began to think about the backstory. I wrote the beginning of the story, about how the teacher approaches the school, enters the office, and encounters the two instructional aids. I then wanted to turn the story elements over to Claude.
I gave it more context for the school, the look and feel of the three classrooms, and then a directive to give our reader 1-2 choices to make in each classroom. I directed it to track two variables on professional judgement and interpersonal relations. I asked for the choices the reader would make to vary their scores based on responses.
We then went through about 10 total iterations. There are certain school situations that Claude didn’t quite well-understand; so the iterations included changes in story and how the student reader would be graded.
The final request was to build in the ability to “go back” and see what you’d responded to, in case you had to step away and forgot about what you’d selected. I didn’t want the reader to be able to change their response.
Finally, when you get to the end, we use the simple screenshot as a way to document your performance.
I’ll share feedback once it’s collected.