Projects

Sparkwise automates live group learning — scaling up the active engagement people need to build skills in business, AI, and more.

An MCP server with unexpected questions and lateral thinking prompts.

Calbright College is a California's new online community college, offering job-focused programs designed to be fast, focused, and free.

Minerva demonstrates a new approach to higher education, built intentionally from the ground up. I worked closely with Minerva's academic team to imagine and build the technologies that make this possible.

Sketchpad is a website that allows people to collaboratively code and share interactive visualizations written with Processing and P5.js. Online since 2010.

Favelog is a self-generating website that archives and catalogs my personal collections of favorites, saves, stars, and likes across the many services that I use online.

Sketchcasting was an addition to Sketchpad that allows individuals to record and share screencasts of collaborative coding sessions that are interactive, forkable, and pixel-free.

Grockit Answers was a Q&A site that I built at Grockit in 2011 to replace YouTube comment threads on educational videos with useful peer-to-peer discussions.

Grockit was a social+adaptive learning platform for problem-based small group study. I worked on many aspects of this platform from 2008-2012.

The Waveback Machine was a little app that turned your computer into a short-hop time machine.

SpellBEE was a website supporting synchronous peer-tutoring games that I ran from 2000-2008. Experiments run on the site served as the basis for some of the data analysis in my doctoral dissertation.

Page Axe was a proof-of-concept Mac app, demonstrated a way to "bring your own security" to any third-party web application.

The best-selling Flip video camera was originally packaged as a $25 »disposable« camera that only allowed for 20 minutes of recording. Some enterprising hackers figured out how to jailbreak the device allowing for reuse, and I wrote some Mac apps to automatically import footage and burn a DVD when a jailbroken camcorder was plugged into the computer. After abandoning the single-use business model and allowing for easy downloading and sharing, the Flip video camera took off.

Coevisualizer was a Mac application providing an experimental testbed for running and visualizing simulations of coevolutionary algorithms.

Berry was a proof-of-concept Mac app, demonstrating how a personal laptop could act as a personal cloud server accessed via my low-tech dumbphone via an SMS-based DSL.

RollerCAD was a class project to create CAD software for roller coasters. This was one of those great experiences where our team became obsessed with improving the application, forgetting that it was just a class assignment.