Vibe Coding

Ever played a game and thought, “This is cool, but I wish I could add a secret level” or “What if the spaceship had rainbow lasers?” That feeling, that creative spark, is called a “vibe.” Your students can use that vibe to become game creators with the help of AI.

Every teacher has a “Guardian of Memory,” a moment that sparked their passion. For me, it was a 1980s text-based Star Trek game I wrote about in part one of this blog entry. That nostalgic spark led to an adventure in modifying classic code with modern AI. Now, you can take your students on a journey.

The lesson plan below offers students an opportunity to revise simple, game code. Students can use this to problem-solve, collaborate, and create in a lesson supercharged with evidence-based instructional strategies. This lesson will integrate several high-impact strategies to foster deep and transfer-level learning.

Vibe Coding is an approach that puts creativity and fun first. Instead of getting stuck on complicated rules, students start with their cool ideas and use an AI partner to bring them to life. This lesson transforms a classic coding activity into an exciting adventure in digital creation.

The Vibe Coding Quest: A Lesson Plan

This lesson guides students to put together a simple game. They turn their creative vibes into real, working code. It’s built on evidence-based teaching strategies to make learning stick.

• Subject: Digital Creation, Tech, Problem-Solving
• Grade Level: 6-8
• The Goal: Students will use their creativity and an AI partner to modify a simple game, learning coding concepts along the way.

Step 1: Find Your Vibe (Brainstorming Fun)

Before writing a single line of code, you will need a framework or idea to start with. Start off with a class discussion using the PRISM framework to get the creative juices flowing.

• Patterns: “What cool features do you see over and over in your favorite games?”
• Reasoning: “Why do you think those features make a game so fun?”
• Ideas: “If you could mash up two different games, what would you create?”
• Situation: “How are games today different from old-school games?”
• Methods: “How could we test if a new feature makes a game better?”

This isn’t just talk. The goal is to activate students’ Prior Knowledge (Effect Size: 0.93) and make the project relevant to them. I don’t know about you, but I have a few ideas about games I have played, from ASCII arts games to first person adventures.

Example of Vibe Coding Prompt: “You are a spaceship captain who has just returned from a journey near a black hole. Explain what you saw and what you learned to a group of middle school space cadets. Use the attached article for your scientific facts, but tell it as an exciting adventure story.”

Step 2: Vibe with the AI (Creative Collaboration)

Now it’s time to bring in the AI sidekick! Students will work with a chatbot to turn their vibe into code.

• Activity: Model how to “talk” to the AI. Instead of just saying “make a game,” show them how to be specific: “Hey AI, here is my game’s code. Can you help me add a new enemy that drops extra points when you beat it?” Maybe include a persona approach, taking academic content or an idea and putting it in the form of a story. You can have students craft their vibe coding prompts in a shared Google Doc or word processor.
• Check the AI’s Vibe with SIFT: Since no AI is perfect, model the SIFT Method for students to think critically about the AI’s suggestions:
  • Stop: Does this code feel right? Is it what I asked for?
  • Investigate: Look at the code. Do I understand what the AI is trying to do?
  • Find: Are there other ways to do this? Let’s ask the AI for another option.
  • Trace: If I add this code, will it mess anything else up in the game?
• Strategy: This whole process is a form of Problem-Solving Teaching (Effect Size: 0.68), where students learn by doing and tackling challenges in a supportive environment.

Step 3: Share the Vibe (Showcase and Feedback)

The best part of creating something cool is sharing it!

• Activity: Host a “Game On!” gallery walk where students play each other’s modded games.
• Strategy: Encourage students to give each other feedback. This use of Peer Feedback (Effect Size: 0.92) helps students learn from each other and see new possibilities.
• Reflection: End the quest with a quick reflection. Ask: “What was the coolest part of your mod? What did you learn about working with an AI?” This builds Metacognitive Strategies (Effect Size: 0.69), helping students think about their own learning.

Vibe Coding is more than a lesson, it’s a new way to create with an expert assistant. Give it a try.

An Example: Black Hole Escape!

Here’s one created through simple prompting in BoodleBox Unlimited ($16 a month for educators; $20 a month for everyone else; read how to get started for free).

As a 13 year old connected to the world via a modem and electronic bulletin board services (BBSs), I found myself playing simple text-based games online. It was 1983, a year after the release from Super Star Trek game in 1982. The version I played was the 1978 text-only copy, which I stumbled upon over a 300 baud connection to a BBS. At the time, learning to program in BASIC was an inducement to purchase a computer. Yet, programming remained beyond me.

Many years later, I longed for the simplicity of those games. All the enhancements pictures, sound, and video failed to live up to the power of my imagination. When I fired a torpedo from my Enterprise at a Klingon, my imagination gave it power and direction. That’s why I started exploring the power of coding with AI. In this blog entry, I’ll share my trek into modding the Super Star Trek code I played so long ago online.You will be able to get a copy of the original code as well as the “2025 Super Star Trek AI-modded version”. In part two, you will get a access to a sample lesson for middle and high school students, so keep an eye out for that.

Boldly Going In Search Of

An early trekker, I found myself wondering, “How could I get the Star Trek game I played as a high-schooler working at the command line on my GNU/Linux machine? Or, even, a Mac or Windows computer?” Doing this isn’t as hard as you might imagine. After a few minutes of searching with Perplexity.ai, I stumbled on Super Star Trek code. Now, I’ve tried to find it before, without success. The AI-powered search really made the difference for me.

Some fun links to explore include:

• Classic Reload’s Super Star Trek for DOS
• Rediscovering the 1978 Text-Only Super Star Trek Game
• Emanuele Bolognesi’s Super Star Trek

Alas, I did not stumble upon these links until a long night after, where I gave Bolognesi’s code to ChatGPT and asked it for help. As such, while you can get a Windows version of Super Star Trek from Bolognesi, the version I prompted my way into has a few minor enhancements.

What You Will Need

To play the vibe coding version I modded with the assistance of two AI chatbots, you will need to install LUA, and perhaps, ConEMU terminal program. The former is a coding environment that Minetest (that Minecraft is similar to) relies upon.

Installing LUA isn’t as difficult as you might imagine. The steps are included at the end of this blog entry. Installing the ConEMU terminal program is straightforward as well.

But before you go doing that, a deeper exploration of Emanuele Bolognesi’s website reveals this tidbit:

If you are on Mac, it’s very easy, Perl is installed in all MacOS versions. Download the source code from GitHub page. Just save the file superstartrek.pl in a folder (eg. Desktop) then open the Mac Terminal. Once you are in, type cd ‘yourfolder’ (eg. cd Desktop), then launch the game with perl superstartrek.pl.

If you already have LUA installed, or you are willing to install it, you can run one of the two LUA versions in the same way (running lua superstartrek.lua).

If you are on Windows, same story, but in this case you will have to install either LUA or Perl, because they are not installed by default. Or you can download the ZIP file using the button above (which already includes LUA).

With that in mind, I downloaded Emanuele’s copy, but then replaced the LUA version of Super Star Trek that Emanuele had in his game folder with the AI-revised one. It works great, and as you can see through the screenshots, offers some more color and other modifications.

Limping On Impulse Power to The AI-Enhanced Version

To get the AI version, I took the LUA version, which I had found somewhere else before ending up at Emanuele’s site, and started an iterative process of revision. Since I am unable to code myself, I relied on vibe coding via Google Gemini at first, and then switched to ChatGPT. I spent most of the time interacting using natural language (e.g. “Add Romulans that can cloak to the game and have them pop up unexpectedly”) with the AI chatbot. Although Gemini did some of the work up front, ChatGPT did the majority of the work.

At the end of the process, ChatGPT ran into a problem it couldn’t fix. In the original game, the Short Range Scan (SRS) simply displays black, uninterrupted space except for stars (represented by an asterisk), ships (“K” for Klingon, “<*>” for the Enterprise), and an occasional starbase. My memory of the 1980s version included dots instead of blank space. The dots help you plot how many spaces you can travel on impulse power. ChatGPT Plus, despite it’s repeated efforts (over 10) couldn’t get past that. At that point, I decided to enlist the help of Gemini 2.5 Pro. It only took two revisions for Gemini to improve the code so that the dots appeared. It was truly vibe coding at its finest!

Some of the exchanges with ChatGPT appear below:

🧱 Structural Integrity: Fixing the Foundations

Early on, we encountered a critical Lua error:

"lua: sst1.lua:1609: 'end' expected (to close 'function' at line 1132) near <eof>"

ChatGPT responded with:

“This suggests that the original superstartrek.lua was already missing ends or had conditional logic blocks that weren’t closed properly… I’ll parse the full script with a real nesting counter, simulating Lua logic.”

Eventually, the codebase was restructured. The result involved closing dozens of unbalanced blocks and verifying syntax line-by-line.

🌌 Feature Overhaul: Romulans, Cloaking, MAP Scans

ChatGPT and I expanded the game by:

• Adding Romulans as a second enemy type
• Giving them cloaking mechanics
• Making them visible (or not) in SRS and LRS scans
• Letting them decloak mid-turn

ChatGPT described it this way:

“Romulans will appear as R on the quadrant map… with a 50% chance per turn to cloak. When cloaked, they are invisible to sensors and immune to fire.”

And it didn’t stop there:

“Romulan decloak suspense? Let’s do it. io.write("\a") os.execute("sleep 0.2") ×3 — it’s like the drama writes itself.”

🎨 Visual Enhancements: Dot Grids, Colors, Inversion

We converted sector visuals to:

• A dot-based grid display
• An SRS coordinate overlay
• ANSI color-coded symbols:
  • K in red
  • R in magenta
  • B in blue on yellow
  • <*> (Enterprise) in bold green on yellow

“Try warping around and watching the galaxy evolve.”

Color application required escaping legacy logic:

“Somewhere in your code, there’s likely something like if O1 == 2 then C1 = '>!<'. That’s overriding our colored ‘B’. Let me exorcise that.”

Still, not all of these changes were successful or were rolled back throughout the vibe coding process. I can definitely see the value of planning the list of enhancements ahead of time, then using it as a checklist as changes are made.

💥 Torpedoes and Audio Drama

We added animated torpedo travel:

lua

CopyEdit

for step = 1, 8 do tx = tx + DX ty = ty + DY io.write("\27[33mo\27[0m flying to (" .. tx .. "," .. ty .. ")\n") sleep(0.1) end

And experimented (and failed) with sound:

“Try in PowerShell or WSL… or use a terminal emulator like ConEmu or VS Code.”

We eventually abandoned sound on Windows, as classic ASCII bell (\a) support proved too inconsistent:

“Let’s be honest — some bells just don’t ring.”

🧽 Bugs, Debugs, and Zombie ROMULAN LINES

One of the bugs that drove me crazy? The repeating ghost:

“ROMULANS REMAINING 0
ROMULANS REMAINING 0
ROMULANS REMAINING 0…”

ChatGPT laughed with me:

“You’re not alone. That’s definitely not what ‘fully exorcised’ looks like.”

It turned out the line was patched inside a loop, or so reported ChatGPT. As you can see, the natural language conversation with AI made revamping the code a collaborative journey full of humor. I did have a moment of unreality. Was I really joking back-n-forth with an AI as we worked on a project through over thirty iterations?

The AI Version Enhancements

You get some idea of the enhancements I tried to get the AI to accomplish. It failed but the successes underscore the power of AI-powered coding. The main enhancements I dropped in included the following:

• Color short range/long range scans for ships
• A MAP command that provides a galactic map showing the results of ALL long range scans, leaving unexplored areas filled with asterisks.
• A working game, even after modifications.

These seem like minor enhancements but they improved game play and more closely resembled the game I played in my early teens via an electronic bulletin board.

In part two of this blog entry, you will get access to some ideas for replicating this with your middle and/or high school students. You will get a lesson plan and link to some online game code you can try modding with AI, as well as a process for facilitating student AI use under your control.

Guardian of Memory

This collaboration was a creative coding adventure. ChatGPT, and Gemini at the end, not only fixed syntax and logic, but provided commentary, refactoring strategies, historical Star Trek flavor, and endless patience. I know some purists may say, as others said about learning HTML vs using a GUI HTML editor, I needed to learn to code in LUA. But the truth is, I didn’t want to learn LUA, no matter how rewarding. Instead, I wanted to a game that would time-warp me to a moment in my memory. Like the fabled episode, The City on the Edge of Forever, I needed transport to a comforting past. Emanuele and AI facilitated that journey.

With their help, I passed into what was and back again. Not a bad feat for an evening’s work.

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Installing LUA for Windows

Want to install LUA on Windows? Here are the directions that worked for me. However, you won’t need it if we follow in Emanuele’s footsteps (which I did).

1. Download Lua Binaries

• Visit https://www.lua.org/download.html.
• Under “Binaries,” download the latest Windows x64 executables (e.g., lua-5.4.2_Win64_bin.zip and lua-5.4.2_Win64_dllw6_lib.zip).

2. Extract the Archives

• Use 7-Zip or WinRAR to extract both zip files.
• Place all extracted files into a single folder (e.g., lua).

3. Organize Files

• (Optional) Rename executables for simplicity:
• lua54.exe → lua.exe
• luac54.exe → luac.exe
• wlua54.exe → wlua.exe
• Ensure all files are in the same folder, e.g., C:\lua.

4. Move the Folder

• Move the lua folder to your C:\ drive, so the path is C:\lua.

5. Add Lua to the PATH

1. Press the Windows key and search for Environment Variables.
2. Click Edit the system environment variables.
3. In the System Properties window, click Environment Variables….
4. Under System variables, select Path and click Edit.
5. Click New and enter: C:\lua