Example
🏆 I Let a Clueless Coach Teach Soccer (And It Actually Worked)
When I saw the soccer challenge, I knew I didn't want to build a standard "here are the rules" course. The World Cup is happening RIGHT NOW this was too good an opportunity to play it straight.
So I came to Claude with a concept already forming: What if we used an Articulate AI Avatar as a funny soccer coach character? He could teach the rules AND share World Cup 2026 facts — but get things slightly wrong. And learners would have to catch him.
That one idea unlocked everything. 🙌
🎬 Meet Coach Blundero
Coach Blundero has been coaching soccer for a very long time. The exact number of years is not important.
He is confident, enthusiastic, and bless his heart not always right. Learners play his Assistant Referee, listening to him explain rules and drop World Cup facts, and blowing the whistle every time he gets something wrong.
I asked Claude to write a Pixar-style 3D character prompt for Articulate AI Avatar and Articulate actually pulled it off. Blundero came out looking like a lovable animated coach straight out of a kids' soccer movie. Honestly one of my favorite moments of the whole build. 😄
🛠️ What's Inside
4 modules. 4 videos. 8 scenarios.
- Meet Coach Blundero — Intro video + a "How to Play Ref" orientation Code Block so learners know what they're getting into
- Know the Rules — Blundero teaches offside, yellow/red cards, and the new 2026 substitution rule. Gets details wrong on all three.
- World Cup Wisdom — Five 2026 facts. Some true. Some very much not. Learners flag or pass each one.
- The Final Whistle — Blundero's outro video. He congratulates learners, gets one last thing wrong, and exits with complete dignity.
Every scenario uses a card flip mechanic learners hit 🚨 Blow the Whistle or ✅ Let It Go, the card flips, and Blundero reacts to being called out. Each block also includes a World Cup Dispatch a real 2026 fact tucked below his claim. Always true. Blundero's claims are not always true.
🤖 The AI Co-Creation Part
Claude and I built this together across multiple sessions character voice, course structure, all four video scripts, every Code Block interaction, and real-time web searches to make sure the 2026 World Cup facts were accurate and current.
What I love about this kind of co-creation is the iteration. I'd see something, react to it, redirect it, and we'd adjust. It's not "AI generated it." It's a genuine back-and-forth that requires you to have opinions and make the calls. The better you get at that loop, the better your output gets.
💡 Three Things I'm Taking Away
Humor is a learning strategy. Learners have to know the correct answer to catch the wrong one. The laugh is the reward; the learning is the mechanism.
The simplest solution is often the best. We built a localStorage scoreboard that tracked points across all 8 Code Blocks. It was clever. It also fought Rise's iframe sandboxing the entire time. We scrapped it and ended with Blundero's outro video instead. Perfect close, zero headaches. 😄
AI co-creation is a skill. The prompt is just the beginning. The iteration is where the real work and the fun happens.
Go give Coach Blundero a hard time. He can take it. Probably.
P.S. Blundero would like you to know he designed most of this course. He did not. He is very confident about it.
1 Reply
🛠️ Update: The Scoreboard Saga (A Tale of Survival)
Posted the morning after, with coffee.
So. About that scoreboard.
After publishing the original article, I sat down with a fresh cup of coffee and a completely unreasonable amount of determination to make the scoreboard work. What followed was an adventure I can only describe as educational.
Here is what I learned, in order:
First, I learned that when you paste HTML directly into a Rise Code Block, Rise strips out the document structure and runs your code in a sandboxed iframe with a null origin. localStorage calls fail silently. No error. No warning. Just... nothing. The score just sat at zero, looking smug.
Second, I learned that the fix was to upload the blocks as zip files instead — just like my Director's Cut build. The moment I did that, localStorage started working. Blundero keys appeared in the storage inspector. It was beautiful.
Third, I learned that an unescaped apostrophe in a JavaScript string — one tiny ' in the word It's will silently kill your entire script. No flip. No feedback. Nothing. Just buttons that look fine and do absolutely nothing. Three blocks went down to a single apostrophe.
Fourth, and most importantly, I learned that Claude is very patient at 7am. 😄
The scoreboard now works. Learners can see their score, get a verdict from Blundero, and hit a Play Again button to reset everything and go back through the scenarios. Blundero is still wrong about the same things. Some things cannot be fixed.
The moral of the story: localStorage is great. Apostrophes are dangerous. Coffee is mandatory.
Coach Blundero has no comment on any of this. He claims the scoreboard worked perfectly all along.
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