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I Coded a Camping Adventure Game With My Son on International Women's Day — Here's What AI Taught Us Both

  • 2 days ago
  • 6 min read

By Marline Paul | ECS Insights™ | March 2026


Let me tell you what International Women's Day looked like for me this year.

No spa. No brunch. No quiet corner with a good book.


I was sitting at my desk, talking to an AI, building a 3D camping adventure game with my son — and it was one of the best days of my life.



It Started With a Hackathon I Almost Didn't Join


A few weeks ago, I came across a 3-day AI Hackathon hosted by Marcin Teodoru and Sabrina Ramonov. The concept was simple: build a real AI product in 3 days, no coding experience required, and compete for $6,000 in prizes. It happened to fall on the same weekend that Lovable, one of my favorite no-code AI building tools, was running their SheBuilds campaign celebrating women builders on International Women's Day.


Two things. One weekend. And honestly? I almost sat it out.


I originally signed up, thinking I might just use the time to work on some other projects I had sitting on the back burner. But then I read the rules: you had to build something completely brand new. That changed everything.


Here's the other thing about this weekend: every first Saturday of the month, I have a personal commitment to myself, a day of rest, reflection, and fun. No client work. No business emails. No worrying about all the things on my plate. Just me, being a whole person.


So I asked myself: What would be fun? What problem could I actually solve?


And then my son walked into the room.



"What Problem Should We Solve?"


My son is a Scout. And if you know anything about Scouting, you know that when troops go camping, there is serious competition over who sets up the best campsite. The Scoutmaster inspects everything: tent placement, fire safety, first aid station, the gateway, the flags, all of it. And our unit? We wanted to WIN.


So I looked at my son and asked him: "What problem should we solve?"


He didn't miss a beat.


We started talking. Bouncing ideas back and forth. I pulled up Claude on my computer and started using text-to-speech so he could just speak his ideas out loud and watch them come to life in our conversation. He would say something, I'd add to it, he'd push back, I'd refine it. Before long, we had a vision: a 3D interactive camping adventure game that would teach Scouts exactly how to set up a campsite, and make it FUN.


We called it Trail to Eagle: Build Your Campsite. Earn Your Badges. A Scouting Experience.



The Moment He Took My Seat


Here's the part I want you to really sit with.


At first, I was the one at the keyboard. My son was walking around the room, telling me his ideas while I typed. But then something shifted. I could see he was getting more and more interested, leaning in, asking questions, wanting to see what would happen next.


So I stopped. I told him to sit down. And I stood up.


I showed him how to go into Lovable and talk directly to the AI, how to describe what he wanted to see, how to tell it when something wasn't right, how to ask it to change and improve. No code. No technical experience. Just his voice, his ideas, and his imagination.


His face completely lit up.


He could not believe that he could just TALK to an AI and watch something he imagined appear on the screen. This is a kid who plays video games every day, and here he was, building one. We hit a snag early on when our first version came out flat and two-dimensional. His reaction was immediate: "That's not what I wanted. It needs to be 3D."


So we went back in together. We problem-solved. We figured out how to tell the AI more specifically what we were envisioning. And when the 3D world finally appeared, scouts walking around a campsite, a Scoutmaster named Wilson greeting players, a troop trailer in the background, fire stations, first aid areas, an ax yard, a gateway with lashings, we just looked at each other.


We built that.



What We Built


Trail to Eagle is a 6-chapter interactive scouting game with Easy, Normal, and Hard difficulty levels. Players work their way through the ranks, from Scout to Eagle, completing challenges in each chapter:

  • Chapter 1 (Scout): Campsite Setup

  • Chapter 2 (Tenderfoot): Fire Building & Safety

  • Chapter 3 (Second Class): Orienteering & Navigation

  • Chapter 4 (First Class): Archery & Marksmanship

  • Chapter 5 (Star): First Aid & Emergency Prep

  • Chapter 6 (Eagle): Final Inspection & Leadership


Inside the game, players earn badges, collect coins, learn camping facts, and complete mini-games, all while being guided by the Scoutmaster. It's educational. It's engaging. And it was built by a mom with no coding background and her son, in a weekend, using AI tools.


If I had tried to build this the traditional way, I would have needed to hire a developer, a designer, and probably a project manager. That wasn't in the budget. But because of AI, because of tools like Claude and Lovable, we built it anyway.



What My Son Taught Me


At one point during the weekend, I asked my son to come back and test the game after we'd worked on it for a while. He played it for a few minutes and then looked at me and said something I wasn't expecting:


"Mom, it's kind of different when you're the builder. You already know what it's supposed to be, so it doesn't feel the same. You probably need other people to test it."

I stopped. Because he was RIGHT.


Later, I brought in my nephews to play the game after we submitted it to the hackathon. They gave us honest feedback. They found things we hadn't noticed. We made updates. And watching them interact with something we built from nothing; watching one nephew get so excited that he immediately wanted to build his own game, that was everything.


He doesn't have a computer yet. But the spark is there. And that spark matters.


We can learn from people older than us. We can learn from people younger than us. Because we all bring different experiences, and those experiences are exactly what make what we build unique.



What This Has to Do With You


I know what you might be thinking. "Marline, that's a great story, but I'm not a gamer. I'm not building apps. What does this have to do with my business?"


Everything.


AI is not just for developers. It is not just for tech companies, Silicon Valley, or people with computer science degrees. It is for the woman who has a problem she needs to solve and an idea she hasn't had the resources to execute — yet.


It's for the entrepreneur who has been putting off that project because she couldn't afford to hire the right people.


It's for the parent who wants to do something meaningful with their kid on a Saturday afternoon.

It's for YOU.


I didn't set out to build a game. I set out to have a fun, restful day with my son. But what I got was so much more than rest; I got proof. Proof that AI, when you approach it with curiosity instead of fear, can unlock creativity you didn't even know was waiting inside you.


AI can feel big and overwhelming. I know, our entire Get Equipped AI Summit this November is built around the question "AI Is So Big. Where Do I Start?" Because that feeling is REAL. But here's what I need you to hear today:


You can't break the tool. Just try.


Start with a problem. Start with a question. Start with your kid sitting next to you, bouncing ideas off each other. Start messy, start imperfect, start small. The only way to get equipped is to begin.



The Takeaway


This International Women's Day, I built a 3D scouting adventure game with my son using AI tools — no coding required. We problem-solved together. We learned from each other. We created something from nothing.


And if we can do that on a Saturday afternoon, imagine what you can build when you decide to stop watching and start doing.

You are equipped for this. 🌟



Marline Paul is the Founder & CEO of Enilram Creative Solutions™ and creator of the Get Equipped AI Summit™. She helps entrepreneurs use AI with clarity, confidence & care through the 3T Framework™.


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