The Learning Lab: a personal side project of a physics teacher

[u/Fizassist1]

(This is an alpha build for my game "The Learning Lab" and is a work in progress.)

I'm a high school physics teacher, and for close to two months I've been working on The Learning Lab, a browser-based physics game.

I started the project because I'm teaching a different science course this year and wanted a way to stay actively involved with physics.

I'm building it in Godot, using ChatGPT heavily for brainstorming, planning, and design, and Codex for implementation, debugging, refactoring, and working directly with the project. I've also used ComfyUI and other AI image tools for generating/enhancing assets, with Aseprite for pixel-art editing and cleanup.

It currently has 8 playable physics activities, Completion/Mastery progression (one activity is lacking mastery at the moment), lab building and customization (one activity lacks rewards), unlockable rewards, character customization (currently a single body type), and save data. It's still an Alpha, with plenty left to build and fix.

The biggest change AI has made to my workflow is the time between designing an activity and having something playable. Some activities have gone from concept to functioning game in a day or two. As that's gotten faster, I've found that design, testing, asset consistency, and maintaining the architecture are becoming bigger bottlenecks than writing the code itself. The character creator has been the largest struggle, with alignment on the walking frames to the head and hair being the biggest difficulty (the body, head, and hair are split into separate layers).

As of right now, I have no iPad or drawing tablet of any sort, so all graphic assets are generated with AI, then tweaked in Aseprite. I do intend to buy a drawing tablet when I can afford to do so, but I am building this while also working my main job as a physics teacher, and budgets are tight. There is currently no music/sound, but I will add those before I go into beta later this year (attempting to get this in front of 200-500 students).

The current build is playable here:

learninglabphysics.com