Meet Claude
Set up your family's camp workspace on the grown-up's account, learn the difference between the app you tap and the model that thinks, and finish with a game that will make one of you laugh out loud.
Misha taps the app on the tablet. That is Buzzy — buttons, a message box, a list of old chats, and not one idea of its own. Inside, doing the thinking, is Mithu the parrot, who has read an enormous amount and is very good at working out what comes next. Misha types. Buzzy carries it to Mithu. Mithu answers. Everyone calls the whole thing 'Claude', which is exactly how the confusion starts.
The app is not the brain. Buzzy is the app you click; Mithu is the model that thinks. Claude.ai is the window, Claude is what writes the answer — and knowing which is which is how you tell a broken page from a wrong answer.
Buzzy is the app. Mithu is the model.
When Misha taps the icon, she opens Buzzy — the app. Buzzy has the message box, the buttons and the list of old conversations. Buzzy has never had an idea in its life.
Doing the actual thinking is Mithu — the model. Mithu has read an enormous amount of writing and is startlingly good at working out which words should come next.
Real life is laid out the same way:
- Claude.ai is the website or app you open. That is Buzzy.
- Claude is the model that writes the answer. That is Mithu.
Why bother separating them? Because it tells you which half broke. A page that will not load is a Buzzy problem, and refreshing fixes it. An answer that is confidently wrong is a Mithu problem, and refreshing fixes nothing at all.
One account, two people — go and find your workspace
Claude.ai is an 18-plus service, so the account belongs to the grown-up. That is not a bit of caution we invented — it is how the service works, and it shapes the whole camp. The adult signs in, the adult stays in the room, and the two of you pass the keyboard back and forth.
Set your workspace up now, and set it up by exploring rather than by being told where to click:
- Sign in on the grown-up's account, on the biggest screen in the house.
- Find where a brand-new conversation starts. Whoever spots it first gets to open it.
- Look for a way to give that conversation a name, and call it Family Camp 01 — Meet Claude. If your version does not name conversations, start your first message with FAMILY CAMP 01 so a search will turn it up later.
- Agree the driver rule out loud: whoever is not typing reads the answer aloud. Nobody in this camp gets to be the audience.
🧭 Menus move. If a button is not where this says, go hunting for it together — finding it is the skill, and the idea outlasts the layout.
The five-minute scavenger hunt
Before you ask anything clever, go hunting. Five things are somewhere on this screen and we are deliberately not saying where — apps get redesigned, and a family that found the controls once can find them again afterwards.
Race each other. You are looking for:
- Where you type. The box your message goes into, and whatever it is that sends it.
- The way to start over. Whatever hands you a blank whiteboard. Session 2 is about why this one matters more than anything else here.
- Your old conversations. Every chat you have had, kept in a list. This is your camp folder.
- The way to stop an answer. Claude can be interrupted halfway through a sentence. You are allowed to do that.
- The way to lift an answer out. Copying it somewhere else is how things reach your Memory Box.
Whoever finds all five first picks tonight's quiz topic. Whoever finds them last reads the first answer out loud in a newsreader voice. If something has moved since we wrote this, the hunt is doing its job — say out loud what you are looking for, then look again.
🧭 Menus move. If a button is not where this says, go hunting for it together — finding it is the skill, and the idea outlasts the layout.
The message window is small on purpose
On a free account you get a certain number of messages inside a rolling window, and then Claude says: not for a while. That is not a fault, and it is not a trick to make you pay. How big that window is changes from time to time and is not ours to promise, so every session in this camp is built to fit inside a small one — which is why each has a handful of prompt cards rather than forty.
Two habits make the window last:
- One good message beats three vague ones. Typing "write a poem", then "make it shorter", then "actually about a dog" costs you three messages. Saying it once costs one.
- Talk between messages. The best minutes of this camp are the ones where nothing is being typed at all.
Nothing across these 15 sessions asks you to upgrade.
Prompts for this session
6 cards, and each one says who types it. Keep this page open beside Claude — the account belongs to the grown-up.
Hi Claude. We are a parent and a kid doing a 15-session family camp together, on one account, on the free plan. This is session 1. In four short sentences: what are you, what are you genuinely good at, and what is one thing you are bad at? Use words a nine-year-old knows.
I am typing to you inside an app on a screen. Explain the difference between the app and the model that actually writes the answers, using a torch and a battery. Under 60 words, and no word longer than four syllables.
List five things people commonly assume you can do but you cannot. For each one, give a single line saying what actually happens instead. No reassurance, no hedging, no apology.
Be the quizmaster for a family game. Print ten numbered questions and do not answer any of them yourself. Odd numbers go to the grown-up and are about the kid; even numbers go to the kid and are about the grown-up. Mix easy and sneaky: favourite food, what they were most scared of at age eight, the best day of their year, the song they would sing in the shower, what they would do with a completely free Saturday. One line each.
Here are our answers in order, with a tick where we were right and a cross where we were wrong: [paste your ten answers]. Turn this into a keepsake page titled 'What we thought we knew — Session 1'. Keep every wrong answer exactly as we said it, put our score out of ten at the bottom, and do not add a single fact we did not give you.
Ask us one more question about each other that we would never think to ask ourselves. Just one. Surprising, kind, and answerable in a sentence.
Ten Questions, Zero Cheating
Claude prints ten questions and answers none of them. The grown-up takes the odd numbers, which are all about the kid; the kid takes the evens, which are all about the grown-up. Say your answers out loud one at a time and let the other person mark it right or wrong before you move on — no peeking at the list, and no changing your answer once their face has given it away. Wrong answers are worth more than right ones: every time somebody misses, the person the question was about tells the real story behind it, and that story is the reason you are doing this. Then paste your answers back in and let Claude lay out the keepsake page.
Four things happen after the quiz. Only one of them deserves a brand-new chat. Say your answer out loud before you click, and you both have to agree first.
Check yourselves
- Buzzy is the app you tap. Mithu is the model that thinks.
- The account belongs to the grown-up — Claude.ai is 18-plus.
- Claude can ask ten brilliant questions it has no way of answering.
- One clear message costs less than three vague ones.
- The wrong answers are the part you keep.
- Claude answered its own ten questions instead of leaving them for us.
- You asked for something unusual and it reached for the usual shape of a quiz. Reply in the same chat with one short correction — reprint the ten questions with nothing written underneath them — and it will comply. If it slips again, add a line saying the answers belong to us and getting them wrong is the point.
- We hit the free plan's limit before we finished the game.
- The limit is a window of messages, not a punishment, and nothing left in this session actually needs Claude. The ten questions are already on the screen, so answer them out loud, mark each other right or wrong, and keep score on paper. Paste the results in later, once the window has reopened, and the keepsake page will be waiting.
- One of us is still playing and the other one has drifted off.
- Hand the keyboard to whoever drifted — being the driver pulls people back faster than being asked to concentrate. If that does not work, close the laptop and finish the ten questions at the dinner table. The questions work perfectly well on paper, and no part of this camp cares where you answered them.