Apps built this way

These are real projects, with what went wrong left in. Start with Rocket School: it was built with Claude and NodeGX, and you can open it yourself.

Rocket School

Rocket School is a maths and typing game for children aged 8 to 12, in English and French. A child makes a player, then races a rocket to a planet by answering questions. It also has three other games: Make Ten Merge, Number Hunt and Monster Gate.

It has no backend (no server storing data). Progress is saved in the browser, and each player gets a save code to carry their progress to another computer.

Claude built it through NodeGX's own tools, the same ones it uses when it builds an app for you.

Open it yourself

1. Open NodeGX.
2. On the start screen, click the Templates tab.
3. Find Rocket School and click Use this template.
4. Give your copy a name and create the project.

It is your own copy, so you can change anything without breaking the original.

A first change to try

The list of skills the games ask about is one node. Open the component Data/Curriculum and find the node labelled "EDIT — the skills — this list IS the school". Add a skill to that list, and every game can ask about it.

Every word the game shows is in Data/Words, in a node labelled "EDIT — every word of the interface, EN and FR".

Or ask Claude to do it:

Open my Rocket School project. Add the 7 times table as a new skill, in English and French. Tell me which node you changed, so I can look at it in NodeGX.

What the first play test found

The first time I played it, I came back with ten complaints. Text didn't wrap onto a new line. The "show me how" button showed nothing. French children had to hold Shift to type a number. The answer appeared below the bottom of the screen, so you had to scroll on every question. And the look was, in my words, "a bit sad".

Every one of those had passed the automatic checks. The checks tested what the app did. None of them tested how it felt for a French eight-year-old on a tablet.

This is how we fixed them:

1. Find the real cause first. The text that didn't wrap came from one shared setting. One fix mended every screen.
2. One job per complaint. Each fix got its own conversation.
3. Look at the screenshots. A text check can't see a button drawn twice or a line cut off. Claude has to open the pictures and look.
4. A person plays it before a fix counts as done. I replayed each fix on a tablet and on a French laptop.

What it teaches you

• Play your app yourself, on the kind of device your users have.
• Describe what you see in plain words. "The text runs off the edge of the card" is enough.
• Send Claude a screenshot of what's wrong. See When something goes wrong.
• Fix one thing per conversation. See One job per conversation.

Other templates to open

The Templates tab also has a Todo list, Planning, Story engine, Pixel dungeon and Members' area. Open one, click around, then ask Claude how it works:

I've opened this template in NodeGX. Explain in plain English how the main page works: which nodes do what, and what the wires between them carry.

Reading a working app is one of the quickest ways to learn what NodeGX can do.

The one that failed

This one was built in code, before NodeGX. The lesson is the same.

It was a tool for people to edit a document together, live. It started with "build a real-time collaborative editor". There was no talking it through, no plan, and nobody checked each part before building the next. After three weeks there were problems everywhere and no clear way back, so it was abandoned.

The first version should have been an editor for one person. Sharing could have come once that worked. See Plan before you build.

Quick reference

• Rocket School is in the Templates tab. Open it and change it.
• Passing checks is not the same as being right. Play your app yourself.
• Describe problems in plain words, and send screenshots.
• One fix per conversation.
• Start small. Add the hard parts once the simple version works.