Escape Rooms, Arcades, and a Grain of Salt: Five Original Games for Introductory Chemistry, Built by One Instructor with Generative AI

Five browser games for a one-semester introductory chemistry course (CHM 1025, Daytona State College) are described: a four-stage retro arcade game on balancing equations, stoichiometry, and Lewis structures; a Halloween escape room on bonding, molecular shape, polarity, and intermolecular forces; a 3D game in which the player shrinks by factors of a thousand from a laboratory bench to the ions in a grain of salt, practicing scale, atomic structure, isotopes, light, and electron configurations; a six-stage arcade game on the textbook's key terms; and a first-week game that sends students to read the syllabus. The games are offered as optional extra credit or for nothing at all; their purpose is to get students to open the chapter one more time and to make the course feel friendlier, not to replace instruction. I built all five in about a month, as side projects; I am a chemist with no programming background and used a generative AI coding assistant, in HTML or in Unity depending on what each concept needs to be seen. Every character, image, sound, and tune is original or used with permission; completion is verified by a code the game issues, so extra credit can be awarded without trusting a screenshot. The games are free, run in any browser with no account, and are published with their source. No learning outcomes are claimed; evaluation is future work.