The third chapter is out!
We taught SQL by making you accidentally call aliens
SQL Side Quest is a story-driven SQL learning game. You don't grind LeetCode-style problems in a vacuum — you play as a signal analyst, write queries against a live Postgres schema, and use the results to act in the world.
Chapter 3, The Arecibo Protocol, is our biggest swing so far: a quiet night shift at a radio observatory that goes sideways when something answers back.
If you've ever wanted learners to feel why LEFT JOIN matters, or why MAX(hop_sequence) isn't just trivia — this chapter is that experiment.
The pitch
You start the Annual Sweep: pick four sky regions, transmit a greeting into deep space, file the report, go home.
Commander Vasquez briefed you. The logbook has sticky notes. The dishes are huge. Nothing ever comes back that isn't a pulsar echo.
Then something does.
The rest of the chapter is the protocol after the protocol: classify the anomaly, reconstruct a scrambled signal, decode it, try to stop what you already sent — and live with the one beam that slipped through.
Play it
If you want to run the Annual Sweep yourself:
👉 SQL Side Quest
Feedback welcome — especially from people who teach SQL, and people who have opinions about whether we should have sent anything in the first place.
Top comments (0)