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 explored how to collaborate with AI:

• 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.
• Targeting Content: Teaching the model to adapt questions based on age—generating Elsa and Superhero questions for kids, and classical music or deep tech trivia for adults.
• Database Gamification: Setting up simple schemas on Neon to store user scores, streak milestones, and award achievements (like getting 5 correct answers in a row).

Under the Hood