Truths & Lies: Teaching AI to My Son

What We Built

Truths and Lies is an interactive two-truths-and-a-lie trivia game. Instead of relying on a pre-written database of questions, the game connects to the **Google Gemini API** to generate trivia dynamically.

Players select a division (Children, Teens, or Adults) and a category (like Sports, Movies, Science, History, or Music), and Gemini instantly cooks up three facts where exactly one is a lie. The challenge is to find the lie without clicking a truth!

Coding as a Family

This app started as a fun, educational way to teach my 8-year-old son how programming and AI work. He came up with the core ideas—choosing categories like Sports Stars and Movies, setting up a Hall of Fame leaderboard, and designing how the badges should look.

Together, we expanded the solo game into a real-time classroom multiplayer experience:

• Writing System Instructions: Learning how to prompt Gemini so that it instructs the LLM to output structured JSON data containing exactly one lie, without giving away which index is correct.
• Smartboard & Live Contest Suite: Designed for teachers to project educational warm-ups on a Smartboard or run 15-second speed contests where students scan a QR code to answer on their own devices.
• AI-Assisted Nickname Moderation: A safety pipeline using Gemini-2.5-flash to screen student lobby names in real time, automatically blocking profanity, crude numbers, and Gen Alpha brainrot slang (like *skibidi* or *gyatt*).
• Zero-Friction Guest Mode: Automatically creates mock sessions on landing, letting users jump straight into gameplay without completing email registrations.

Under the Hood