I learned systems by playing games.
Now I build them.
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
Where it started
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.
The thread across all of it
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.
Where things stand
PlayEDU is a solo operation, built alongside a full-time career in IT and infrastructure. SportsMan and FactorySim are both in alpha, with playable demos live on this site. 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.