Rising Tide Education · Tools for teaching game design

Six tools for teaching game design. None of them need the internet.

Everything here runs in the tab you opened it in. No account, no API key, no model call, no server. Open a page once and it keeps working on a dead connection, on a school laptop from 2017, on a USB stick you hand to the teacher next door.

These are rules engines, not AI. They show you every rule that fired and what it cost, so you can disagree with them on specifics instead of trusting them on faith.

Subject: game design and game development Audience: high school teachers Cost: nothing, forever

Lecture designer

Pick a topic, a length and a class level. Get a session plan with timings that actually add up, an opening hook that is not a definition, checks for understanding at sensible intervals, a practical activity and a closing that gives you evidence.

Use it when you are teaching core loops on Tuesday and it is Monday night.

Rubric builder

Describe the task in plain words. Get a rubric with real criteria and four honest levels, weighted, editable in place, exportable. Built for game work, so it can grade a prototype and a playtest log rather than pretending they are essays.

Use it when the assignment is written and the marking scheme is not.

Assignment triage

Paste an assignment and find out how easily a model could just do it. Scores exposure out of 100, shows every rule that matched, suggests the smallest change that fixes it, and writes you an AI policy line for that specific task.

Use it when you suspect the answer arrived before the thinking did.

Assignment and grade memory

Classes, assignments, rubrics and grades, held in this browser on this device. Export to a file you own, import it back on any machine. It says plainly on the page what it is and what it is not, because a gradebook that quietly loses a term is worse than no gradebook.

Use it when you want continuity without a vendor.

Student sandbox

A space for one student to work a design problem end to end, with structure and prompts at each stage. It finishes with a one page design document you can read, and an honesty check that tells them where their own design is vague. Nothing leaves the browser.

Use it when a student says they have an idea and cannot say what it is.

Pedagogy guide

What high school students actually get wrong about game design, what order to teach it in, how to assess a thing that is played rather than read, and how to run a playtest as a lesson that survives contact with thirty teenagers.

Use it when you are teaching this subject for the first time.

Why it works like this

No network callsNothing is fetched after the page loads. Conference wifi cannot break it.

No keys, no loginNothing to sign up for, nothing to expire, nothing to bill you.

DeterministicSame input, same output, every time. You can predict it and check it.

Shows its workingWhere a tool makes a judgement call, it tells you which rule fired and why.

What this is not. None of these tools are intelligent and none of them know your students. They encode judgement about teaching game design into rules you can read and argue with. Where a tool could only look clever by faking understanding, it does less instead. If a plan or a rubric it gives you is wrong for your room, you are right and it is wrong. Change it.

Take it with you

Every page is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no dependencies. Save the page from your browser, put the folder on a USB stick, email it to a colleague, host it on your school intranet. It will still work in five years because there is nothing in it that can stop being supported. If you want to change how a tool scores something, open the file and edit the rules table near the top of the script. It is written to be read.