Vibe coding — building working software through natural-language conversation with AI rather than traditional programming — has quietly removed the technical barrier that once kept faculty and students from creating their own interactive learning tools. This session embodies the symposium's central paradox: the same capability that lets a student generate code without understanding it can let a humanities professor build a simulation that finally makes an abstract concept click. In thirty minutes, participants watch a fully playable classroom simulation emerge live from a plain-language prompt, then interrogate what that means for learning. When a literature, economics, or government instructor can prototype a simulation in minutes, who is doing the thinking — and is that a problem or a breakthrough? Participants leave with a shared, honest framework for deciding when vibe-coded simulations deepen understanding and when they short-circuit it.
