This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
You’re studying how Hitler’s rise to fame unfolded in the Weimar Republic. Economic causes, political crisis, beer hall rallies, cut-price populism. Serious stuff, but heavy going.
Then someone in class says: what if we made a beer hall simulator?
You pour pints, serve customers, make money. Hitler wanders between the tables spouting nonsense. Get him drunk enough and his popularity drops. Let him talk and it rises.
That’s a video game. You just designed it. And an AI builds it while you’re talking.
This is the after-school activity I have in mind.
AI applied to video games applied to the humanities. History, philosophy, literature, economics. Games have always been rule systems built on real-world activities and events.
The format is simple. The class sits down. The teacher is the only interface with the AI agent. The students focus on coming up with ideas and coordinating to give it instructions. The teacher types, guides, asks questions. The agent builds. At the end, everyone plays together.
No one needs to know how to code. No one needs to know how to use Godot. What you need is the ability to reason about a problem and work together.
History translated into mechanics.
When a student decides that “drunk equals less popularity”, they’re reasoning about how political consent actually worked in Weimar Germany. They’re building a causal model. They’re doing what historians do, with a tool that feels like their own.
The game forces you to simplify — deliberately. You have to choose what matters, what to measure, what to leave out. That choice is the critical thinking you’re trying to teach. And then you play. And you have a laugh. And that laugh is memory.
New frontiers
Today, anyone with a clear idea and an AI agent can have a working prototype in hours. Not a masterpiece — a prototype. Something that runs, that you can touch, that responds.
Access to creation is no longer filtered by technical ability. It’s filtered by clarity of thought.
Schools already have after-school activities like robotics, drama, and computing. All perfectly valid. But there’s a new territory I think is worth exploring: using AI to turn humanities subjects into interactive experiences that students design together.
Someone will do it, sooner or later. It could start in any classroom.