AI Skill: Text generation
The Scenario: A rainy afternoon mystery. AI writes a short whodunnit set in your house, with your family as the suspects, and you hide the clues for everyone to find.
What you need
- ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini (free versions all work fine)
- Paper and pens (or a printer) for the clues
- About 30-40 minutes, including hiding clues and solving the case
How to do it
- Give each family member a nickname for the game – the sillier the better. This keeps real names out of the prompt and makes the whole thing funnier.
- List the rooms in your house you want to use as locations. Just the room names (kitchen, garden, etc.), nothing more specific.
- Decide what’s gone missing or what’s happened.
- Open the AI app and paste this prompt:
Write a short whodunnit mystery set in a house, for a family to solve together. The suspects are: [nicknames]. The story takes place across these rooms: [rooms]. The mystery is [mystery].
For each suspect write their version of events. This, combined with the room clues, should point to the culprit.Then write one physical clue for each room listed, that point towards the real culprit.
The ages of the children involved are [ages]. Make it complex enough that it is not solved right away, but keep the language simple enough for them to understand. Require that they read all the suspect statements and room clues in order to figure out the mystery.
- Write each room clue onto its own small piece of paper and hide it in the room it belongs to.
- Pass the statements to each family member
- Read the introduction to your kids and send them off to solve the mystery
Good to know
- Nicknames keep real names out of the prompt.
- Room names on their own are enough. There’s no need to mention your address or anything else that identifies your home.
- If the mystery the AI writes doesn’t fit your house (too many rooms, wrong layout), just ask it to adjust.
Take it further
- Try letting the AI come up with an idea for the mystery by adjusting the prompt.
- Add this line into the prompt to make it even harder “Make sure at least two clues point to more than one suspect, so the children need to cross-reference several clues and statements together to narrow down the real culprit – not just follow a single clue straight to the answer”.