AI Builder Starter Repo — Instructor Setup

The AI Builder series uses a separate GitHub repository as the starter template. Students fork it once at the beginning of the series and grow the same quiz app across all four workshops.

Canonical repo: Lansing-Tech-Studio/quiz-game
Live site (canonical): https://lansingtechstudio.org/quiz-game/
Live site (student forks): https://<their-username>.github.io/quiz-game/

The canonical repo is the single source of truth — edit it directly, not from this workshops repo.

Updating the starter template

Clone the canonical repo and commit changes there:

git clone git@github.com:Lansing-Tech-Studio/quiz-game.git
cd quiz-game
# ...make changes to devcontainer.json, mcp.json, README.md, index.html...
git add -A
git commit -m "Describe the change"
git push

Students who have already forked won’t automatically get the update. Tell them to use GitHub’s Sync fork button if they need it.

Branch convention (instructor’s personal copy)

  • main — base template; mirror of the canonical starter repo’s main. Don’t edit during workshops.

  • current — your live-demo branch. Create it fresh from main at the start of each cohort:

    git checkout main
git pull
git branch -D current 2>/dev/null || true
git checkout -b current
git push -u origin current --force-with-lease   # only on your fork
  • During each workshop, demo on current. Commit live so students see the history grow.

Students should be told to work on main (or any branch they want) in their own fork. They don’t need to know about current — that’s just your demo workspace.

Walking students through the fork + Pages flow (Workshop 1, 0:00–0:15)

  1. Fork: open https://github.com/Lansing-Tech-Studio/quiz-game → Fork → Create fork
  2. Codespace: from their fork, Code → Codespaces → Create codespace on main
  3. Enable Pages: on their fork (in a separate browser tab), Settings → Pages → Source = main / root → Save

The Codespace finishes building while they enable Pages, so the two waits overlap. By the time both finish (~2 min), each student has:

  • A live published page at https://<their-username>.github.io/quiz-game/
  • A Codespace with Copilot, Copilot Chat, Live Preview, and Playwright MCP already running

Workshop 4 team repo (team-quiz-app)

Workshop 4 uses a second repo: Lansing-Tech-Studio/team-quiz-app
Live site: https://lansingtechstudio.org/team-quiz-app/

It is a standalone copy of a completed quiz app, not a fork of quiz-game. That matters: students already forked quiz-game in Workshop 1, and GitHub only allows one fork per repo network per account — so the team repo must live outside the quiz-game fork network for students to fork it.

Students fork team-quiz-app, build on a branch in their fork, and open pull requests to the upstream. They are never added as collaborators; only the instructor can merge.

The repo has automated tests (tests/unit/ via node --test, tests/e2e/ via Playwright) and a GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/tests.yml) that runs both suites on every PR targeting main and on every push to main — a merged PR arrives as a push, so each change runs exactly once. Extra team copies (team-quiz-app-2, …) inherit the workflow automatically. One thing to expect during the workshop: GitHub holds Actions runs from first-time fork contributors until someone with write access clicks Approve and run on the PR — that’s you, once per student’s first PR.

To reset it for a new cohort, force-push a clean baseline over main (e.g., from your own up-to-date quiz app copy) and keep the team-workflow README.md, tests/, and .github/workflows/ that live in that repo.

Troubleshooting

A student’s Pages site shows 404 even after a push. First push to a brand-new Pages site can take up to 5 minutes. After that, give it ~1 minute per push. If it’s still 404 after 5 minutes, check that:

  • Pages source is main / root (Settings → Pages)
  • index.html actually exists in main (not a different branch)
  • The repo is public (Pages on private repos requires a Pro account)

Copilot Chat doesn’t see the Playwright MCP server. After the Codespace finishes, run Developer: Reload Window from the command palette. The server should appear under Copilot Chat’s tools list. If not, check the Codespaces output panel for postCreateCommand errors.

Student doesn’t have Copilot access. GitHub Copilot is free for verified students via GitHub Education (education.github.com). Verification can take a few days. For day-of fallback, pair them with a student who has Copilot, or have a small pool of instructor-funded seats available.