Projects
Things I've built outside of papers: games, tools, and prototypes. The research and the side projects are more connected than they look: a lot of what I think about in studying learning and conversation shows up in how I approach game design.
Games
Tide & Tower
A hangman variant built for a friend. Instead of a gallows, a sandcastle sits on the beach; each wrong guess brings the tide closer until it washes over. Runs in both English and Haitian Creole, with hints written in Creole for the Creole mode, built after learning the friend it was made for teaches remotely at a school in Haiti. The Godot project is named Kastèl Sab: sand castle in Haitian Creole.
Gin & Tonic
A roguelike where you fight enemies by playing Gin Rummy. Melds deal damage (sets multiply rank by card count, runs deal the sum) and relics collected between fights modify your playstyle. Inspired by Balatro and Slay the Spire. The web version runs in Phaser; I'm mid-way through evaluating a port to Godot 4, with the decision gating on whether GDScript can run a backtracking meld-finding algorithm in under 50ms for 10-card hands.
Pixel Pickaxe
A tap-clicker organized around discrete 5-minute mining expeditions instead of an infinite treadmill. Before each run you pick a loadout (pickaxe, three miners, two active skills), then race to beat a cave boss before the timer runs out. 12 themed caves to clear, roughly 30 runs to finish the game. The design argument: idle game research shows completion and power are the top player motivators, and most clickers only deliver power. Part of the Tideline Games project.
Menderbloom
An incremental game about healing a dying world one terrarium at a time. You tend plants, exploit seasonal synergies, and prestige by releasing a terrarium to restore a region (100 regions in total). The central design problem for the genre: how do you make something that feels like a living garden rather than a spreadsheet with plant names?
Tools
Life Calendar
A "Your Life in Weeks" visualization: your entire life rendered as a grid of weeks, color-coded by era or activity. Built after reading Tim Urban's framing that most people have around 4,000 weeks; I wanted a version with a personal data layer and reflection prompts attached to specific weeks rather than just a static poster.
Learning Through Technical Interviews
An AI-powered technical-interview practice platform for data science students. Real-time assessment against standardized rubrics for technical communication, code comprehension, strategic thinking, and coding creativity. Built on the adaptive-assessment framework from Ion et al. 2025 (iRAISE).
MathMentorDB
Structured dataset built from a large public mathematics Discord server, transformed into conversation-level units with participant roles, timestamps, and channel metadata. Underlies most of my recent empirical work on tutoring discourse. A pseudonymized release is available on Hugging Face.