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The great unsolved mystery: What happened to learning games?
The last of the great learning games died with Carmen Sandiego and I wanted to find out why. PopCap games was founded in the year 2000, and we all fell in love with titles like Bejweled, Dynomite, TyperShark, and Bookworm. Then came the first of the app stores in 2008, and the years since have been spent mindlessly clicking though one mini-game or another on our phones. There are a plethora of fast-math and vocabulary apps that reward memorization and quick recall, but that is not learning.
I am nostalgic for games like The Oregon Train and The Island of Dr. Brain. Those were genuinely fun games that challenged us with curiosity, problem-solving, and critical thinking. And they managed to do that while still being fun!
While working at the forefront of education research and project-based curriculum design, I realized the technology was always behind. Educational research and development move through long bureaucratic funding and approval cycles, and by the time projects were approved and learning materials were developed, the “cutting-edge” technology was already outdated.
There were many goals that drove me to a Ph.D. in educational measurement. One of which was finding ways to reduce the burden of teachers’ unpaid labor. My dissertation focused on automated scoring models for evaluating students’ short-answer responses, and my first opportunity after graduate school brought me into the EdTech industry, doing similar research in the applications of AI in educational contexts. I spent a great deal of time building generative systems and evaluation frameworks, trying to push large language models to create something that resembled authentic educational materials.
AI facilitates many process very well. It can speed up content development and break down articles into summaries and note taking guides. AI even performs similarly to humans at classifying essays into a few scoring categories. But it is just not ready for many of the tasks to which it is being applied.
Where is the issue? AI struggles with outliers and all of education is built on outliers. Every student brings a unique set of experiences, conceptions, and misconceptions into the learning process. Educators spend years learning how to account for those differences, designing curricula that gradually deepen understanding over long conceptual progressions. AI is not yet capable of building lessons grounded in that kind of developmental learning framework.
There is also a deeper problem with the push toward fully personalized AI-generated learning materials. If every student receives dynamically generated content in real time, it becomes increasingly difficult to compare learning outcomes, validate assessments, or meaningfully interpret test scores. Yet many people around me were convinced the systems were working perfectly well. I eventually realized that many of those people were brilliant software engineers who had never designed a research-backed curriculum or studied how learning actually develops over time.
That was when I realized there was very little education left in EdTech because there were so few educators involved in building it. Despite understanding the shortcomings, many companies have laid off the educators capable of identifying these problems. Concerns about instructional quality are often treated as obstacles rather than expertise.
The real priority in much of EdTech is fiduciary responsibility — profit above learning. Gamification, engagement metrics, addiction, one more click. It becomes exhausting trying to explain to an engineering team why a student learning mathematics might actually need to enter mathematics into the application.
And then I met Dr. Gunnink. After our first conversation about the need to put education back into EdTech, I knew we were going to build something together. Only a few weeks after meeting her, I told her, “We both have strong personalities, and I know we are going to argue one day. But we are also going to build something amazing together.”
When she asked me to help design the psychometric platform behind what is poised to become the first truly educational game in two decades, I did not hesitate.
Inspired by Dr. Gunnink’s tenacity and vision for Rise Evolved, I began designing what I believe is the future of EdTech infrastructure. The EduMetrix Ecosystem is designed to connect the missing pieces in modern educational technology. It serves as a bridge between learning science and software development, providing tools that support both classroom learning and technical integration for development teams.
AI has an important place in education, but meaningful implementation requires more than automation. It requires understanding where AI excels, where it fails, and how to design systems that account for both.
Educators interested in helping put the “Ed” back into EdTech can contact our team for partnership and compensation details through the NWD Consulting Network website while we continue building the platform and software ecosystem.