How kids can write good prompts
A prompt is how you tell an AI what you want. Clear words get better pictures, and learning to describe an idea well is a skill kids will use for the rest of their lives. Here's a recipe that works for game characters.
The recipe: 1, 2, 3, plus 1
- What it is: a dragon, a robot puppy, a castle.
- What it looks like: colours, size, clothes. "small", "purple", "with a yellow scarf".
- One fun detail: "who loves pancakes", "with rocket boots", "made of candy".
- Plus one idea at a time: describe the main character on the character step and the world on the world step.
Good, better, best
| Good | Better | Best |
|---|---|---|
| a dragon | a purple dragon | a small purple dragon who loves pancakes |
| a dog | a robot puppy | a shiny robot puppy with rocket boots |
| a place | a mountain | a candy mountain at sunset |
| make it hard | three lives | double jump, three lives and a boss at the end |
Try again, change one thing
If the picture isn't quite right, don't start over: change one word ("blue" instead of "purple", "tiny" instead of "big") and draw again. That's exactly how grown-up designers work.
What never goes in a prompt
- Full names, schools, addresses, phone numbers or passwords.
- Real people or famous characters: invent your own instead.
- Anything you wouldn't want to show your teacher.
Our builder turns these away with a friendly message, and that's part of the lesson: AI tools have rules, and good prompts work within them.
Imagination first, safe limits always
Kids' imaginations are amazing, and we want them to run wild. We also put safe limits on what our AI will make: ideas are checked before anything is drawn, the AI only draws in one friendly cartoon style, and every drawing is checked again. No automatic check is perfect, so a real person reviews every game before it's published on the arcade. If we can't publish a game, we tell the grown-up why and refund them.