My son wants to be a commercial airline pilot. One night, around 2 AM, I started playing with Claude to see what would come out.
First I asked it to gather real questions from commercial aviation exams. Then to research what makes a good game hold you, starting from Jane McGonigal and Seth Priebatsch. A few hours later we had Pilot Quest: seventy levels, each built on a real exam question, from easiest to hardest.
I tried it and got stuck several times, on physics well past what school teaches. My son cleared those levels before I did, and enjoyed it.
Three intelligences played that night: I built the game, my son played it, and Claude played along in the small hours. Everybody won.
A Skill is a folder of instructions you give an AI once, so it carries a specific capability every time you load it. Upload Pilot Quest and your assistant becomes a flight instructor running a seventy-level curriculum, with XP, hearts, badges, and the patience of a former airline captain.
Anthropic created the format for Claude and opened it to everyone in December 2025 as an open standard. ChatGPT and Gemini now read the same files, though not on every plan yet: as of October 2026, ChatGPT offers them on Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts, and the Gemini app is still rolling them out. Pilot Quest was built and tested on Claude. It is a human+AI product, born from the conversations between Seth and Noēsis.
To look under the hood: Claude's guides on creating skills and using them, skills in ChatGPT, and skills in Gemini.
- Seventy levels, from basic principles of flight to airline operations and CRM, built on real commercial aviation exam questions
- A difficulty curve drawn from Jane McGonigal's four superpowers of gamers and Seth Priebatsch's game dynamics
- No dead ends: a wrong answer gets an explanation and another question at the same level, not a locked door
- Works for a curious teenager and a distracted adult. The early levels are gentle. The late ones are genuinely hard.
Let's play Pilot Quest. Start at Level 1.Free. No account needed to download. Claude account needed to play.
This was built by someone with no game design background and no aviation expertise, in a few hours, at 2 AM. It is imperfect, and it made a 13-year-old happy. That is the actual point, and the deeper argument of Manifesto 30: Play as Inquiry.
The recipe
- Ask Claude for deep research on whatever your kid loves: real exam questions, quiz questions, or the knowledge milestones experts in that field actually use.
- Ask for a second deep research on game mechanics: progression, difficulty curves, engagement loops. How do the best educational games keep people playing?
- Ask Claude to build a Skill, some number of levels, one concept per level, ordered by difficulty, with explanations built in for when the player gets stuck.
It takes a couple of hours. Your kid will know you built it for them, and that matters more than any production value.
Tell us what your kid loves and we will build them a Skill for free, with the topics you choose. We email it to you when it is ready. We don't need your kid's name.
Got it. We'll write when the Skill is ready.
A Skill is a rehearsal. These programs put a young person in a real cockpit:
- EAA Young EaglesFree first flight with a real pilot, ages 8-17. Over 2.1 million flown since 1992.
- Civil Air Patrol Cadet ProgramAges 12-18, low cost, can solo at 16.
- AeroEducate (EAA)Free online aviation curriculum and activities, K-12.