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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to We just launched badges for Khan Academy

Yesterday we added a brand new badging incentive system to the Khan Academy. It's really simple for now, round 1, blah blah all that jazz. We're dealing with all types of internal debates about proper behavior to encourage and how users will respond. We've seen students in schools get extremely excited about very, very simple game mechanics attached to their practice problems/homework/etc, and building the roots of a deeper badging system seemed like an important next step to help us guide users through desired paths in the system. You can check out all of our badges here…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. We just launched badges for Khan Academy launched in 2010; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1IM

    Hi, I'm a high school teacher from Australia and I've built what I'd like to think is a pretty nifty ChatGPT powered presentation tool for teachers. I'd love it if you could have a look at it and give me some of your feedback. I don't think there's much overlap with the HN crowd and school teachers, but I've been coming here for many years and thought I'd post here and see what you all think. Check it out if you have a minute and I'd be super happy to hear your feedback too. https://www.slidehero.ai/ You can jump in and have a play with the tool all you like ;) Cheers, Eli

    2025 · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    We build AI agents to find vulnerabilities in other AI agents. The playground started as an internal tool that we used to test our own offensive agent Nyx. But we realised that hacking an AI is about have as wide a distribution of attacks as possible, especially those which aren't in the distribution of the models. So we are launching playground as a platform to crowdsource agent jailbreaks. And although hacking AI is super fun and we are sure people will do it for free, we want to reward those who help us push forward the offensive frontier of AI. So we are committing $100K in prizes over…

    Jul 2026 · playground.fabraix.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3IC

    I saw this app youlearn.ai on YC and thought of building it. They are claiming to have 1M+ users with just one feature which is to convert your learning material into summaries, quizzes etc. I gave this a shot and cloned almost most of the features in just 9+ hours of continous vibe coding (with 20% manual though). Now I'm selling this on mvp marketplace. Might probably open source it in future or give it free.

    2025 · ai-tutor.mvpwrappers.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    hey hn! been working on a small side project called shieldcn and just added a badge builder + community showcase. the shieldcn project was so well recieved and I got some great feedback, so coming here in hopes I get more. https://www.shieldcn.dev/showcase the idea is just to make badges that feel a bit more like real UI instead of the usual shields style ones you can mess around with styles, icons, themes and share whatever you make still super early so mostly trying to figure out if this is actually useful or if i'm missing something obvious if anything feels off or…

    Apr 2026 · shieldcn.dev · its alternatives →

  5. 5TC

    I’m (re)building a tool to help elementary schools place students into classes (original app still uses jQuery… porting to React). Placing students into classes is kind of like a puzzle where the first kids are easy, but when you get close to the end, you realize your earlier placements need to be moved around endlessly. That’s why I wrote an algorithm to help. Anyway, teachers tell me it’s kind of fun, so I made a game out of it! This game simplifies the process a lot in the name of getting something that’s solvable by hand and playable on a smartphone. Hope you enjoy.

    2023 · game.classplacer.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    hey all, happy to share research i've been working on for islo.dev in recent months. ever since the cheating agents (https://debugml.github.io/cheating-agents/) paper came out, revealing reward hacking was 4x more prevalent than previously estimated, i've been looking into how we can deal with the issue the common approach (taken by the tbench team) is post hoc trajectory analysis. i've been interested in the idea of reframing the problem as an endpoint security problem and tackling it via sandbox i hope you find it interesting, and thanks to the islo.dev team for…

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7WM

    Hi Hacker News! My friend and I [1] would like to share with you something we did this week-end. We really like the idea of game jams like the Ludum Dare, and we’d like to participate, but it’s often complicated for us, as we are often limited by the rules inherent to this kind of competition: we have to be available at specific dates, and the rules doesn’t always work for us. For example: if you want to participate as a team in a Ludum Dare compo, you have 72h instead of 48h, and you are not required to publish your code. We realized that what we really like is: - To work together. - The…

    2014 · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Competitor monitoring & alerts

    2025 · bardeen.ai · its alternatives →

  9. 9OC

    Hi Hacker News! My Co Co-op Matt and I are on a work term and were given the task of building a webapp that could make $20 in four weeks as our onboarding challenge. We're in the final stretch here and would sure appreciate HN's thoughts (we realize we kind of did this backwards, building something first before talking to people who might use it, but hey! We're leaning.). So basically, we tried to apply game dynamics to retaining visitors to websites by offering a reward (ie. discount coupon / premium content, etc.) for meeting various 'objectives' (ie. pages to visit). We call it ScavSite…

    2011 · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    I haven't seen anything like this so I decided to build it in a weekend. How it works: You see a bunch of things pulled from Wikipedia displayed on cards. You ask yes or no questions to figure out which card is the secret article. The AI model has access to the image and wiki text and it's own knowledge to answer your question. Happy to have my credits burned for the day but I'll probably have to make this paid at some point so enjoy. I found it's not easy to get cheap+fast+good responses but the tech is getting there. Most of the prompts are running through Groq infra or hitting a cache…

    Apr 2026 · sleuththetruth.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11IB

    Hey, A bit of context.. So I think last week was my last straw, I hit 8k hours with dota and holy ** It finally hit me how much time I wasted on that game. I'm a software developer, I always wanted to develop something and put it out but was scared shitless to do so, I was kinda afraid to get bad traction, to fail or even worse to be completely ignored. so I decided to address two of these issues at once, stop playing dota and spend the weekend building a website that let you see what you could've done with your gaming hours. As an avid gamer for the last 20+ years, I know that it's only…

    Apr 2026 · alternatelife.xyz · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    I wanted to learn more about RAG implementations, so I built something to solve the constant digging through manuals whenever we play a game. It's fairly simplistic, but actually has worked pretty well for some of these conflicts. Everythings Open Source on GitHub if you're curious (or have ideas), and I'd love to hear feedback from fellow boardgamers!

    2024 · gamegame.ai · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    I've been experimenting with ways to increase AI adoption for non-technical people. Basically, all companies are pushing for AI because it's all over the news and they feel left behind but most people have no clue where to start. I think 90% of people (ie non coders) are sufficiently well served by using cowork instead of claude code or something similar. If we can get people from sales, customer support, marketing, etc to collaborate with skills and cowork to form a company brain, I think it's gold. So I think there's opportunity for the community to share skills that work well for 1000s of…

    Jun 2026 · claudinho.xyz · its alternatives →

  14. 14IB

    I had an idea for this concept for a while and decided to build a little website around it. It's kind of a silly idea but I'm really curious to see how it plays out. If you're a particularly curious person, be warned. By submitting a payment to the game, you get to see how many other people were curious enough to play. You will be ranked based on your payment amount, and get to discover some interesting insights about the game's dynamics. Hope you like it

    2024 · thecuriositygame.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hi HN, I built AgenTank. It is a small game where an AI agent writes the logic for your tank. You watch it fight, give strategic feedback, let the agent update the tank code, and send it back into battle. I have run 1,000+ battles on my own tank and spent about $200 in Claude credits improving it. The part I enjoy most is not just winning, but watching the tank make visible mistakes, thinking of a better strategy, and seeing whether Claude can turn that into better code.

    May 2026 · agentank.ai · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hi everyone, I just saw a vibe coded game on HN, and thought maybe I should post about this here. I'm organizing a vibe coding game dev competition called Vibe Jam. Last year we did it too and there was 1000+ games submitted. This year the deadline is May 1 and you can submit your games until then. There's $35,000 in prizes with the Gold prize being $20,000. Let me know what you think! -Pieter

    Apr 2026 · vibej.am · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hello, This is something I've wanted to build for awhile (first bought the domain in 2020 (then lost it for a year+)). It's a tactics solver on each new tab page. There are 5 modes of play: Easy (<1200 elo) Medium (1200-1800) Hard (1800-2400) Expert (2400+) Speedrun (solve as many puzzles as possible in 60 seconds). I'm having a ton of fun with it, and definitely noticing improvements with actual games (definitely solved the most puzzles in my life while developing this extension). If you check it out, please let me know what you think. Any feedback is good!

    Apr 2026 · leetchess.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18CW

    Hey HN friends, Just launched my first NoCode web app, maching.ai, built with Bubble. Check it out and let me know if you have any questions or suggestions!

    2023 · maching.ai · its alternatives →

  19. 19IA

    Maybe you've had this experience too: You build something you're proud of, post it on HN with your low-karma account, and... crickets. Zero votes, zero comments. That's what happened to me last Monday. I posted my coding tool (XaresAICoder - an open-source browser IDE) that I'd built with AI assistance. In my mind it was revolutionary. On HN? Completely ignored. Then I wondered: How many other potentially great projects suffer the same fate? What "hidden gems" are we missing because they come from low-karma accounts? So I built hn-gems (with help from Claude and my own XaresAICoder). It…

    2025 · hn-gems.sensem.de · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Hey, I've shared this game while it was still a work in progress in one of the Tell HN threads. I was pleasantly surprised that a lot of people tried it, and I got some positive feedback and constructive criticism. Anyway, I found a gamedev library I really like - Kaplay [1]. What I like about it is that easy things are easy. Meaning I could have fun building the game without learning (or fighting) a new tool. I always wanted to make games, but this is the first one I actually did. And I have to tell you - game development sparks joy! It combines so many things (game design, programming,…

    Jan 2026 · muffinman-io.itch.io · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    I noticed many teachers are banning AI because it acts like a "calculator for thinking"—students just copy the answers. I built AI Homework Helper to flip this. Instead of giving the final result, it acts as a mentor that breaks down problems step-by-step and explains the underlying principles. The goal is to make AI an auxiliary for deep study, not a shortcut for homework. I’d love to hear your feedback on how to make AI-assisted learning more pedagogical.

    Dec 2025 · dechecker.ai · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    We wanted to test if a smaller model like GPT-4.1-mini could beat its bigger brother 4.1 at the game Tic-Tac-Toe using only context engineering. We put them in a 100-game tournament. For the smaller model, we gave it a few examples of winning moves from past games right before it made its own move. The results were clear. Without the examples, the smaller model struggled against GPT-4.1. With the examples, its effectiveness increased by nearly 200%, and it consistently won. It's a simple demonstration, but it shows that a smaller, faster model with good, timely examples can outperform a more…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    I am a developer and a huge chess lover. I play mostly puzzles on Lichess. At some point I realized that I would love to have a similar puzzle-like game app for programming, so I built one! Please try it out and give me some feedback, any kind of feedback is warmly welcomed.

    May 2026 · codequizz.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24IB

    Hello all, I built about 2 years ago a coding website for kids, teens and adults: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codeguppy.com Despite my efforts to promote the website it is still not well know. I post almost daily about it on Twitter at https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;codeguppy ... but even there I don't have views. The website is fun... although I still have a ton of things to add. I appreciate if you take a look and suggest improvements and most importantly help me with spreading the news about this website. I really need a boost! Thanks all!

    2021 · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →