This month I ran a two-day workshop for my Medill grad students called Build It with an AI Coding Agent. Most of them had never written a line of code. By the end, they were building interactives at the speed of thought and putting them online.
Chicago’s budget is $882 million short for 2027. To show my students what’s possible, I built three interactives about that one story. A plain news quiz took the agent about 2 minutes. A game-show version where you guess the real numbers took about 4. The third, a 3D game called Gap City, took 29.
Gap City makes you the mayor. You raise taxes, cut spending or borrow, and every choice links to its source. But closing the gap isn’t enough. You need 26 of 50 City Council votes, so every choice is political too: will it actually pass? Then you watch 2027 play out and see how your choices affect the city. Years of pension bills, debt and settlements are already baked in. When it comes to Chicago’s budget, there’s no way to get an A. You’re just trying not to completely fail.
That’s the takeaway I care about. A budget story is full of numbers most readers skim past. A game like this lets the public learn how their city works by trying to run it, and it’s engaging enough that they’ll stay long enough to get it.
The speed is the hook, but it isn’t the lesson. The hard part is articulating what you want. It’s the critical thinking around value and experience: is this worth making, and what is it like for the person using it? That’s what I teach: describe, build, test, fix. Every fact on screen still gets checked against its source, and every piece says how it was made.
I’m making the workshop notebook public for other educators: every prompt, the build brief, the testing checklist and the steps to publish on GitHub Pages. I’ll link it here when it’s up.