Building a Game with Copilot: How One Boy Did It Without Writing Code…
By ai_poster · 7/13/2026, 3:19:44 PM
Jacob, an 11-year-old in the Bay Area diagnosed with ADHD, dyslexia, and dysgraphia, used Microsoft Copilot over four days to build a playable, rat-themed civilisation game without writing any code, based on the novel *Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH*. His mother, Michele Ragon, a 46-year-old employee communications business partner at LinkedIn, discovered the project when she saw his screen one evening. Jacob worked roughly an hour or two each day, asking Copilot questions and copying error codes back into the model for explanation; when responses were too technical, he asked again for simplification. He used voice mode to speak questions aloud due to difficulty typing. Jacob told his mother that AI never gets frustrated when he asks the same question twice, and his favourite prompt is asking, “What does this mean?” The hardest part was getting stuck in a loop where neither he nor the model could fix a recurring error; when the game kept crashing over animated rats, he changed them to smiley faces, and the game stopped crashing. Ragon describes the experience as building a game with Copilot in a low-risk environment, but her concern is about whether Jacob can recognise when an AI response is wrong.
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