Innovation Profs - 4/18/2025

Welcome to the Friday edition of the Innovation Profs newsletter. Look for us in your inbox every Tuesday with the latest news in generative AI and on Fridays to focus on making you more productive with generative AI. Let’s get started…

But first, sign up for our FREE summer-themed ChatGPT update on May 14.

Building an Artifact with Claude

In yesterday’s generative AI class at Drake, we opened with an exercise by asking students to take a few minutes to search the web and identify some of the top news items in generative AI over the past week, with the aim of learning about which sources our students consult and reinforcing the value of keep up with the latest trends in generative AI.

I (Porter) had the idea that we might turn this activity into a Family Feud-style game, where we have a display of the top news items, each one covered up, and then we uncover each news item as they are identified by the students. We didn’t opt to go that route for a number of reasons, but later this got me thinking: How can I build a simple version of a Family Feud game I can use in the classroom?

To answer this question, I turned to one of my favorite tool: Claude Artifacts. What are Artifacts? From Claude’s website: “Artifacts allow Claude to share substantial, standalone content with you in a dedicated window separate from the main conversation. Artifacts make it easy to work with significant pieces of content that you may want to modify, build upon, or reference later.”

If you’ve followed the recent discussion of vibe coding, Claude Artifacts are one of the tools you can use to vibe code, i.e., direct an LLM to produce code via a natural language conversation without delving into the minutiae of the code.

So I opened up my free Claude account and got prompting. My goal was to be as clear as possible in describing the game interface, but without worrying about getting everything right on the first pass.

Immediately Claude got to work, coding up the game in React:

If you’re unfamiliar with what it looks like for an LLM like Claude to code, the screen splits into two windows, with the conversation on the left and the coding interface on the right.

Once the coding finished up, a playable demo of the game replaced the code on the right-hand side of the screen, and so I gave it a whirl with the question, “What are the three primary colors?” I set the game up to start with a set-up mode, which worked out well.

After setting up the game, clicking “Start Game” should shift to the student-facing mode, and indeed, it did:

Of course, no Family Feud game can be complete without the big red X that follows an incorrect response, and so I was pleased with the outcome of entering the incorrect answer “black”:

This worked out pretty well, and it was already pretty usable, so I decided to publish the game as is by clicking “Publish” at the upper-right corner of my screen, which gave me a sharable link to share the game with others.

Clicking on the link sends me to playable version of the game, but with one additional wrinkle: anyone with a Claude account (free or paid) who plays the game can choose to remix the game by clicking the “Remix Artifact” button in the lower-right corner of the screen.

Why remix a perfectly good Artifact? For one thing, my game doesn’t keep track of how many red X’s are accumulated, so I attempted to create a new version of the game with this change. The resulting interface put the X’s at the top of the display, which I found odd, so I tried again.

The result—success!

Feel free to try out the original version, or you can try the updated version. Or if you’re feeling daring, try out remixing the game and sending us a link at [email protected]. Finally, if you want to learn more about vibe coding, sign up for next week’s Vibe Coding Lunch Club!

Upcoming events

👾 Vibe Coding Lunch Club
When: 12:30-1:30 p.m. Central on April 23
Where: Virtual on Zoom
Cost: $30
Attendees will learn about vibe coding, a new trend in generative AI where people are able to code projects with little to no coding skills by simply describing what they want to create. Sign up now.

😎 Hot GPT Summer 2
When: Noon Central on May 14
Where: Virtual on Zoom
Cost: FREE
Our free kickoff to summer is back. Join us for this 45-minute Zoom call to catch up on the latest advancements in the world of generative AI. Sign up now.

Generative AI Mailbag

This week’s question: What are some tools I can use for vibe coding?

Answer: As you’ve seen above, you can vibe code with Claude Artifacts. You can do something similar with ChatGPT, which uses its Canvas feature to write code. Google just launched its own vibe coding tool, Firebase Studio. And there are tools like Cursor, Lovable, and Replit. Finally, if you want to see some pretty serious vibe coding in action, take a look at Vibe Coding 101 with Replit, a mini-course on DeepLearning.AI.

Do you have a question about generative AI? Submit it by replying to this email or sending an email to [email protected].