Charlie is in 5th grade. Handed a tool that will build almost anything, she built a spelling bee.
Then she gave it a difficulty level called Impossible.
Play it the way she built it
Pick a level and the announcer speaks. Nothing appears on screen. You press a button, listen, and spell what you heard — which is the game, and the one decision the whole thing rests on. In a spelling bee you can read, there is nothing to do.
Miss it and there’s a second button: Use in a Sentence. Real bees work that way; the kid at the microphone can ask the judge for it in context. Then Charlie adds a third step. After you spell the word, the game wants you to use it in a sentence of your own.
Three wrong and you’re eliminated. Not a lower score. Eliminated, and the streak counter goes back to zero and sits there.
Nine tiers, ending in one word
Behind those buttons sit nine tiers of words.
Tier one is cat, dog, sun. By tier four you’re spelling necessary and definitely, the ones adults get wrong. Tier seven is onomatopoeia and Mediterranean. Tier eight is antidisestablishmentarianism.
Tier nine holds one word. pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis — forty-five letters, and what you get from inhaling too much volcanic ash. In her code it carries a comment: // Tier 9 — BOSS WORD.
That comment says where the idea came from. Charlie plays games. A spelling test is not a game, so she gave it a boss.
The part that took the longest
Every word in the app carries its own example sentence. Forty-one words, forty-one sentences, written by hand.
An elephant never forgets. The pirates searched for buried treasure. Don’t exaggerate — it wasn’t that scary!
She could have asked the AI to write them and moved on, and the AI would have written forty-one clean, correct, forgettable sentences. She wrote them instead. That’s why one is a joke, and why the hard ones teach you what the word means instead of just using it.
The announcer’s rate is set to 0.88, a little slower than default, because that’s how a bee announcer talks. You only arrive at a number like that by listening to your own build and deciding it isn’t right yet.
What the tool doesn’t give you
Ask an AI for a spelling game and you get one. It works. It is also the game everybody else gets: the word on screen, a text box, a score.
Charlie’s came out of the same tool. What separates them is every decision the tool was never going to raise: hide the word, or the thing isn’t a bee. Nine tiers, so there’s somewhere to climb. Write the sentences yourself.
AI brings the speed. The Builder brings the direction.
She built it in Spark, which we made for kids, and a finished project there runs in a browser — no install, no account, nothing to download. That’s why you can play it in this page, and why what a Builder finishes is something they can hand to anybody.
So go lose to it. This page gave away most of the words, which leaves tier nine, and reading a word is not spelling it back after a voice says it once. The full gallery has the rest.