My background is in systems analysis — understanding how things connect, where the bottlenecks are, and why a process breaks down under pressure. But I didn't learn most of that in a classroom. I learned it by playing video games.
Games have a way of teaching systems thinking that nothing else quite matches. You don't read about supply chains — you mismanage one and watch your production line collapse. You don't study analytics — you lose a match because you never looked at the numbers. That kind of hands-on, consequence-driven learning sticks in a way that passive content simply doesn't.
PlayEDU exists because I kept seeing that same gap in the communities around me: people who needed better tools, but the right software just didn't exist for them.
Fostering computational thinking through play, focusing on logic over syntax, and ensuring a balanced, supportive environment.
Fostering computational thinking through play
Focusing on logic over syntax
Ensuring a balanced, supportive environment
The clearest example was in a classroom. Watching students sit through a business or operations course — disengaged, checking their phones — while the concepts being taught were the exact same ones I'd internalized years earlier by running a simulated factory in a game. The content wasn't the problem. The delivery was.
That became FactorySim: a simulation where students manage a factory, compete against their classmates, and discover efficiency and bottleneck concepts by actually dealing with them — not by reading about them.
SportsMan came from watching local coaches struggle to keep records for every single player — managing rosters, tracking plays, and piecing together stats across a full season on notepads and spreadsheets. The work was already being done. It just deserved a real tool.
TCG Scanner is for the collectors and players I know who spend hours manually cataloging and pricing cards. That's a solved problem — it just hasn't been solved well yet.
Applications for communities where the right tool doesn't exist yet — starting local, designed to scale.
Every product is an analytics and systems problem first. The game or the interface is just the way in — the one that actually gets used.
K-12 coaches and schools, classrooms of all ages, card collectors, and anyone who learns better by doing than by watching.
PlayEDU is a solo operation, built alongside a full-time career in IT and infrastructure. SportsMan is in beta and being used. FactorySim is in active development with early classroom testing underway. TCG Scanner is open source and in alpha — contributions welcome.
If you're a coach, a teacher, or someone who's felt the same gap I have — I'd like to hear from you. The roadmap is shaped by the people who actually need the tools.