Prompt to Play

Event Details Organizer: AI Club, American University of Iraq–Baghdad (AUIB)

Event Title: Prompt to Play

Date: Wednesday, June 24, 2026, 4:00 PM

Location: American Space, American University of Iraq–Baghdad (AUIB) Introduction The AI Club at the American University of Iraq–Baghdad (AUIB) hosted an event titled "Prompt to Play" on Wednesday, June 24, 2026, 4:00 PM at AUIB's American Space. The event aimed to teach students the fundamentals of working effectively with AI tools through a hands-on, build-as-you-go format, and brought together students from across disciplines who were interested in learning how to get better results from AI.

Event Overview The event featured a live training session led by Mohammed Abdulaziz, a backend and systems developer and co-founder of the AI Club. He shared insights about prompt engineering and demonstrated its core techniques by building a playable video game live, in real time, in front of the audience. Rather than presenting prompting as a matter of clever wording, the session framed it as a structured way of organizing one's thinking before asking an AI to act, moving deliberately from the simplest techniques to the more sophisticated ones.

Key Discussion Points / Main Activities • Building a game live to teach prompting: The session used a single evolving video game project to demonstrate how AI-assisted development actually works as a structured process, taking the project from a vague, forgettable first attempt to something genuinely playable. • Progression through six techniques: Attendees applied zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, chain-of-thought reasoning, context engineering, prompt chaining, and meta-prompting — each building on the last to show how output quality improves at every stage. • Embracing iteration and error: When live prompts did not behave as expected, the room worked through why, reinforcing the idea that diagnosing problems and iterating is a normal and valuable part of building with AI. Student Engagement The event was deliberately participatory. Throughout the session, students were invited to critique early outputs, propose new features, diagnose what was breaking, and ultimately play the game as it evolved. Audience-suggested features were built live on top of the existing work, allowing attendees to see their own ideas shape the final result and to apply every technique covered in the session firsthand.