ASL Play

Two prototype games for learning American Sign Language fingerspelling.

🤚

Learning App

Tap-to-match card games that build from handshapes to full signed sentences.

  • Match the hands
  • Hands to letters
  • Spell the word
  • Build the sentence
  • Read real signs
Play →

Works on phone & desktop

 🕹️

ASL Pac

An arcade maze game — steer Pac‑Man to eat handshape letters in spelling order.

  • Swipe, tap the arrows, or use WASD
  • Eat letters in the right order
  • Yellow dots are bonus points
  • No lives, no timers, no failing
Play →

Works on phone & desktop — best in landscape
These are early prototypes. The artwork is placeholder material sourced from Wikimedia Commons and has not yet been reviewed by a Deaf consultant or fluent signer. Some signs involve movement that a still image cannot show. Please treat this as a demo of the game mechanics rather than a finished ASL teaching tool.

Quick Start: change this game yourself

Never written a line of code? That is genuinely fine. You install one tool — Claude Code — and from then on you simply ask it, in plain English, to do things. It sets up your computer, fetches this project, and makes the changes for you.

Written for Windows 10 and 11. About 20 minutes, most of it waiting.

Three things you need first
  • A Windows PC.
  • A paid Claude plan — Pro or Max. The free plan does not include Claude Code.
  • An invitation to this project on GitHub. It is private, so ask for access before you start.

  1. Open PowerShell

    PowerShell is a plain text window built into Windows. Press the Windows key, type PowerShell, and press Enter.

    A dark window opens with a blinking cursor. That is all it is — a place to paste things. You will not need to remember any of it.

  2. Install Claude Code

    Copy the line below, paste it into PowerShell, and press Enter:

    irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex

    It prints a lot of text and takes a minute or two. When it finishes, close PowerShell and open it again so Windows notices the new tool.

    Saw “running scripts is disabled on this system”? Windows blocks new scripts until you allow them. Paste this, press Enter, then try the line above once more: 
    Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser

  3. Start it and sign in

    Type this and press Enter:

    claude

    Your web browser opens so you can sign in to your Claude account. Once you are done the window says Login successful, and you are talking to Claude Code.

    It always asks first. Claude Code shows you what it wants to do and waits for you to approve before touching your computer. Read each request and say yes. Nothing happens behind your back.

  4. Ask it to set everything up

    This is the part that would normally be a long checklist of installing things. Instead, paste this whole paragraph as your message to Claude Code: 

    Please set this project up for me. I have never programmed before,
so explain what you are doing in simple terms as you go. Install
Node.js and Git if they are missing, download
https://github.com/TacoTruckGames/ASL_app into my user folder,
get the webapp folder ready to run, then start the learning app
and tell me which web address to open.

    It will work through the steps, asking permission along the way. This takes several minutes. When it finishes it gives you a web address — usually http://localhost:8081. Open that in your browser and the five levels appear.

    If it installed Node.js or Git, those only become available in a fresh window. Close PowerShell, open it again, type claude, and say “carry on setting up the project”. It picks up where it left off.

  5. Make your first change

    Leave the app running. Ask Claude Code for something — in ordinary words, not code: 

    Add a new word VAN with a van emoji to the Level 3 word list

    It finds the right file, shows you exactly what it wants to change, and waits for your approval. Say yes, and the app in your browser updates by itself. You just shipped a change.

    Not seeing VAN? Level 3 picks six words at random each round, so play it a few times. Nothing is broken.

    Other things worth asking, once you are comfortable:

    What does this project do?
Make the cards in Level 1 wiggle faster
Change the background colour to light blue
Explain how the celebration animation works
Add a word for every letter of the alphabet

  6. Undo anything, any time

    Nothing you do here is permanent, and you cannot break the real website. If you want to start over, just say: 

    Undo all the changes we made and put everything back how it was

    Experiment freely — that is the whole point.

When you want to go deeper

You never have to open these yourself — Claude Code will find them — but it helps to know roughly what lives where when you ask for something.

webapp/src/theme.ts
The colours, and every word and sentence the learning app uses. The friendliest place to start.
webapp/src/
The five levels themselves, one file each.
PacMan/
The arcade game. Built with a different tool (Godot), so it needs its own setup — ask Claude Code about it when you are ready.
DESIGN.md
Why the games are built the way they are. Ask Claude Code to summarise it for you.

Stuck? Claude Code has its own quickstart and troubleshooting pages — or just describe the problem to Claude Code itself and ask it to fix it.