How to Build Your First AI Simulation: A No-Code Guide

Building an interactive simulation does not have to start with a blank screen or a software development project.

LiveCase gives educators a no-code authoring environment where they can start with source material, learning goals, a scenario, or a rough idea and turn it into an interactive learning experience.

Start With the Learning Objective

Before choosing an interaction, decide what learners should practise. That might be negotiation, leadership, crisis response, strategy, communication, ethics, or decision-making under uncertainty.

The technology should support that objective rather than define it.

Give the Authoring AI Useful Context

LiveCase's authoring workflow can work from material you already have. You can paste text, upload source material such as PDF, DOCX, TXT, Markdown, HTML, or CSV files, add a URL, and provide additional guidance about learning goals, scenarios, roles, and constraints.

The more useful context you provide, the more useful the initial structure will be.

Turn the Material Into an Experience

The authoring process helps you move from source material to an interactive case structure. The resulting experience can combine character conversations, context, evidence, multimedia, questions, scoring, feedback, and other interaction types.

You are not required to make the case branching. A straightforward linear experience can be the right design.

If branching adds real pedagogical value, LiveCase uses badges to control access to later content. A learner's answer can award a badge, and later chats can be configured to appear for learners who have that badge.

Choose the Right Interactions

LiveCase supports a broad set of chat and interaction types, including:

• Character messages and context
• Meetings and voice memos
• Images, video, GIFs, files, slides, and browser content
• Multiple-choice and popup multiple-choice questions
• Text questions for open-ended responses
• Checkboxes, dropdowns, ranges, rankings, matrices, and allocation activities
• AI chat for live AI-powered character conversations
• Scoring and characteristics for measuring different dimensions of performance

You do not need all of them. A good simulation uses the interaction that best creates the moment of learning.

Use AI Chat Deliberately

AI chat is one component of a LiveCase, not the whole experience. It lets a learner have a live conversation with an AI-powered character inside the authored scenario.

LiveCase currently supports one AI chat per episode, so authors should place it where a conversational interaction genuinely improves the learning experience.

Add Branching When It Helps

Branching is optional. When you need different paths, use badges to connect learner choices to later content.

For example, a learner's response to a leadership dilemma could award a badge representing a coaching-oriented approach. A later character message could then be shown only to learners with that badge.

Keep the main story understandable. Branching should create useful differences in the learning journey, not a maze for its own sake.

Build in Feedback and Scoring

A simulation becomes more useful when learners can see what their decisions mean.

Multiple-choice questions can be scored and mapped to characteristics. Open-ended text questions can use AI-powered dynamic feedback against an author's ideal answer or criteria. Authors can also design consequences, reflection, and debrief moments around the decisions learners make.

Keep Episodes Focused

For a first build, start with one focused scenario and a small number of meaningful decision points. LiveCase authoring guidance generally recommends keeping an individual episode around 10–15 minutes.

Larger learning journeys can be organized into Episodes, Seasons, and Series.

The Goal Is a Better Learning Experience

The fastest way to build a good simulation is not to add more technology. It is to make the learner do something meaningful.

Give them a situation. Give them enough information to reason. Ask them to decide. Respond to the decision. Then give them a reason to think again.

LiveCase's authoring tools can handle much of the production scaffolding, while the educator remains responsible for the learning objective, scenario, decisions, and instructional judgement.

Start small. Build one useful experience. Then add branching, AI chat, multimedia, scoring, or additional episodes only when those elements improve the learning outcome.