Why My Passions Reside in Educational Software

It started with a geology lesson I couldn't stop thinking about.

My friend teaches earth science at a public high school, and one afternoon over beers he was describing how he tries to explain plate tectonics to his students. He pulls up a static diagram, maybe a YouTube video if the WiFi cooperates, and asks fifteen-year-olds to imagine continents drifting over 500 million years. "They glaze over," he told me. "I can see it happen in real time." And I remember sitting there thinking: I could build that. Not a diagram. Not a video. A thing you can touch and scrub through time and actually watch Pangaea rip apart.

That conversation became Strata. But more than that, it cracked open something I'd been circling for years without naming it.

The Pattern I Didn't See Coming

I've been a front-end engineer for over twenty years. BFA graduate who fell sideways into code and never climbed back out. I've built marketing sites, dashboards, design systems, component libraries. Good work. Paid the bills. But somewhere in the last few years I started noticing that my side projects kept landing in the same territory. I wasn't building portfolio pieces or chasing trends. I was building learning tools. Every. Single. Time.

Solar propulsion simulator

Solar came first, a celestial propulsion simulator where you fly through the solar system with different drive types. Equal parts art installation and technical tool. Then Mission Control, where you design and build rockets, run real physics calculations, and launch challenge-based missions from orbit insertion to lunar trajectories. Then Molecular, a 3D chemistry environment where you can rotate molecules, explore electron orbitals, and build compounds in a sandbox. Then Strata, with its three full modules: a Tectonics simulator spanning six geologic eras with real paleoshoreline data, an Atmosphere module with day/night cycles and season controls, and an Earth Systems sandbox where you manipulate the carbon cycle and watch the planet visually deteriorate if you push it too far.

Mission Control, rocket building and launch simulator

Four projects. Each one more deliberately educational than the last. And at some point I had to ask myself: why?

The Gap Nobody's Filling

Here's what I kept running into. Gaming companies pour millions into physics engines, particle systems, lighting, interaction design. The craft is extraordinary. I reached out to several gaming studios early on, partly for inspiration and partly to understand what they were doing that education wasn't. The answer was simple and frustrating: everything. Education gets flat diagrams and multiple-choice quizzes wrapped in cartoon interfaces. Gaming gets WebGL renderers, real-time physics, haptic feedback, narrative arcs. The tools exist to make learning feel like discovery. Almost nobody's using them that way.

I think about PhET a lot. They've done incredible work at CU Boulder, and their simulations have been a gold standard for years. But the web has moved so far beyond what most educational tools look like. Three.js and React Three Fiber let a single developer build 3D environments that would've required a team of ten a decade ago. Next.js handles the infrastructure. Vercel AI Gateway makes it possible to embed an AI tutor that actually understands the domain. The technology is there. The ambition to apply my passions is continuing to grow.

Molecular chemistry and physics educational explorer.

Solar and Mission Control taught me the craft. But Molecular is where I got intentional about education. I built a three-tier system into it: guided lessons for beginners, exploratory mode for the curious, and a deep-dive layer for students who want the real orbital mechanics. Plus an AI tutor that doesn't just answer questions but asks them back, pushing you toward understanding instead of handing you the answer. That architecture (tiered complexity with an intelligent guide) became the blueprint for Strata and everything I build going forward.

Living with a Teacher

My wife teaches preschool special education. Her students are three and four years old, way too young for anything I build. But living with her has fundamentally changed how I think about designing learning tools.

She comes home with stories about kids who need six different entry points to grasp a single concept. One child learns through touch, another through repetition, another through music, another won't engage until you remove every distraction from the environment. She thinks about accessibility not as a compliance checklist but as a philosophy. And those conversations seep into my work whether I intend it or not.

When I designed Molecular's tiered system, I was thinking about her students. Not as users, obviously. But as a reminder that learners aren't uniform. Some people want to be guided step by step. Some want to smash atoms together and see what happens. Some need the math. A good learning tool has to hold all of those people without making any of them feel stupid or bored. That principle came directly from watching my wife think about her classroom.

Craft Matters

I keep coming back to this conviction: educational software deserves the same craft that goes into a AAA game. Not the budget, obviously. But the care. The attention to how something feels when you interact with it. The physics in Mission Control aren't simplified arcade approximations. They're real. Gravity, thrust vectors, orbital mechanics. When your rocket fails, it fails for a reason you can understand and fix. That's not showing off. That's the whole point. If the simulation feels fake, the learning feels fake too.

Pitch Tracker MLB pitch visualization tool

Structle started as a puzzle game: a daily bridge-building challenge where you place joints and beams and test your structure against real physics. But even there, the engineering concepts are genuine. Stress distribution, load paths, material limits. You learn by breaking things and figuring out why they broke. PitchTrack visualizes MLB pitch trajectories. Different domain entirely, but the same obsession: take complex data and make it something you can see, rotate, and interrogate with your hands.

The craft isn't decoration. It's the mechanism of understanding.

What I'm Building Toward

So here's where I plant my flag.

I want to bring all of these tools under one roof. A single educational platform where Molecular, Strata, Mission Control, Solar, and whatever comes next live together as a coherent suite. Chemistry, earth science, physics, aerospace, all built with the same design principles: real simulations, tiered complexity, AI-assisted learning, and the kind of visual craft that makes students forget they're studying.

I don't have a timeline. I don't have funding. What I have is a growing collection of tools that keep getting better, a network of teacher friends who keep telling me what's missing from their classrooms, a wife who reminds me daily that every learner deserves a way in, and twenty years of engineering skill that I'm finally pointing at something I actually care about.

This is what I want to do. I've been circling it for years, and I'm done circling. The projects exist. The pattern is clear. The work is already underway.