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You're in charge: the pop-up café challenge
Tomorrow, your community centre is hosting a neighbourhood fair. You have volunteered to run the café for two hours. There is a folding table, a borrowed urn and £120 in the café fund. Your mission: give visitors a welcoming place to grab a drink or snack, and raise money for the centre. You have access to a chatbot such as ChatGPT or Claude. It can help you explore options, play fictional customers and challenge your decisions. You are the café manager. The final calls are yours. By the end, you will have tested and improved an AI adviser: an initial prompt and response, a checked revision and examples of advice you accepted or rejected for a stated reason. The café plan and supplied results let you test the AI’s claims rather than judge its confidence. You will need: access to a text chatbot, somewhere to keep notes and a calculator. No paid features, web searches or coding are required. Work alone or with a partner using one conversation. This is a fictional management game. Its prices, customer profiles and results are supplied for the exercise. Costs and operations are deliberately simplified; this is not a real café launch plan.
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What you'll learn
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:
- Brief a chatbot adviser with constraints, facts and explicit unknowns.
- Check generated café plans for unsupported demand claims and inconsistent calculations.
- Improve a prompt after a supplier update and verify that the revised advice uses current rules.
- Use AI customer role-play for rehearsal while separating generated reactions from evidence.
Recommended before you start
None of these are hard requirements. The lesson is easier if they are already familiar, but everything it uses is explained along the way, so you can start without them.
- Access to a text chatbot, a calculator and your own notes. No coding, browsing or paid features required.
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Inside this lesson
24 sections, about 85 minutes.
Section one is open to everyone. Create a free account to work through the rest and take the quiz.
01
Free previewTake the keys
If the chatbot is slow, ask for shorter responses and move on when you have enough information to decide. Keep the surprise intact: read in order. Do not read the stages “Surprise delivery”, “Challenge your adviser”, “Open the results envelope” early or paste the entire lesson into your chatbot. Give it only the material requested at each stage. Your adviser should discover the surprises when you do. The fair runs from 11 am to 1 pm. The organiser initially expects 80 visitors. You do not know how many will buy something or what they will choose. A visitor might buy a drink, a snack, both or nothing. You have £120 in starting cash. A fixed £20 event charge covers your table, equipment, cups, serving materials and other running costs in this game. This leaves up to £100 for stock. You do not have to spend it all. Volunteers provide the labour. There are no extra costs, taxes, fees or donations to calculate in this simulation. Your supplier offers four products. You may stock any or all of them.
02
Unlock free The rules of play
03
Unlock free What counts as success?
04
Unlock free Appoint your adviser
05
Unlock free Start your decision journal
06
Unlock free Build your opening plan
07
Unlock free Ask for two plausible plans
08
Unlock free Know which number you are looking at
09
Unlock free Check the recommendation with your calculator
10
Unlock free Meet your customers
11
Unlock free Start the conversations
12
Unlock free What did you actually learn?
13
Unlock free Make the call
14
Unlock free Invite disagreement
15
Unlock free Surprise delivery
16
Unlock free Decide before asking
17
Unlock free Lock your final order
18
Unlock free Challenge your adviser
19
Unlock free Open the audit notes after your attempt
20
Unlock free Open the results envelope
21
Unlock free Calculate your actual result
22
Unlock free Did you meet the mission?
23
Unlock free Worked example: use this to check the method
24
Unlock free Your final debrief
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Around 85 minutes to work through, plus the quiz at the end. You can leave and come back at any point.
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