In my last semester of undergraduate at Columbia I took a game development course that had a big impact on how I thought about learning, work, and play. It convinced me to completely change careers, from film to game design. After college I worked as an educational game designer at Enspire Learning in Austin, Texas and then at the company behind Lumosity.com. Designing cognitive training games was fun, intellectually-engaging work, but it also led to a nagging feeling that there were questions about working memory, attention, and executive function that I wouldn't even begin to answer if I stayed in industry. So I went back to school... but not before working on many educational games and simulations. Here are just a few.

I worked on two financial literacy games, Celebrity Calamity and Groove Nation, for the Doorways to Dreams Foundation, now Commonwealth. 

I provided curriculum and game design for Future U, an SAT prep game from Aspyr Media, in partnership with Kaplan, and available for the Nintendo DS, Mac, PC, and iOS.

I worked on the design and development of two new-employee games for Sun Microsystems, meant to encourage collaboration across the company. This work is featured in Changing The Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business by David Edery and Ethan Mollick.  

Of the over two dozen cognitive training games I worked on at Lumosity.com, Word Bubbles Rising is one of my favorites: a phonemic verbal fluency game where participants have to generate as many words as possible in a limited amount of time, with shifting constraints.