Sandlot
2026
Tools used: TypeScript, React, Railway, OpenAI API, Claude Code
Source: Retromatic on Github
A daily fantasy baseball draft spanning every era of the game. Pick your legends,
build a roster, and see how your Sandlot Score stacks up on the community leaderboard. Features
AI-powered auto-drafting, AI-generated player portraits, and shareable results. A love letter to
baseball history, updated every day.
Tangled Tower
One Day in February 2026
Tools used: Phaser, JavaScript, Google Gemini Imagen 4.0, Claude Code
Source: Tangled Tower on Github
A Rapunzel-themed platformer I built for my daughter Alice. All sprites were
generated with Gemini Imagen 4.0 and run through a custom chroma key pipeline. Boss fight, cutscenes,
level transitions — built in a single day with Claude Code.
Monster Smash
One Day in February 2026
Tools used: JavaScript, HTML5 Canvas, Web Audio API, Claude Code
Source: Monster Smash on Github
Henry's monster truck battle game! Draft trucks with different rarities and stats,
then smash them together in an arena with charge timers and health bars. Built with Claude Code for a
very demanding 6-year-old product manager.
Bookshelf+
2025
Tools used: Google Gemini, Learning Science, VitalSource Bookshelf
I invented Bookshelf+, an AI-powered study tutor built into the world's largest
eTextbook platform. Grounded in instructor-assigned course materials, students can ask questions,
simplify concepts, and generate flashcards. 1.7 million student interactions since launch and winner of
Campus
Technology's 2025 Product of the Year for AI-Based Tutoring.
Dino Battle
2025
Tools used: React, Vite, OpenAI API (GPT + Text-to-Speech), Replit
Inspired by the Who Will Win book series. Draft dinosaurs with unique
powers, then face off against the computer. OpenAI writes an original battle story and determines the
winner, then reads it aloud with word-by-word highlighting. My kids' favorite bedtime activity for a while.
AI Principles & Published Research
2024-2025
Tools used: Learning Engineering, Peer-reviewed Research, Generative AI
Shark Bites with Henry!
September 2024
Tools used: Google NotebookLM, Suno
A podcast I created with my 5-year-old son Henry about sharks, one species at a
time. We fed his favorite shark website into NotebookLM to generate episodes and wrote the theme song
with Suno. Six episodes, over 1,000 downloads. Available on
Apple Podcasts,
Spotify, and everywhere
else.
Planet Smart
2023
Tools used: Carbon Accounting, Reforestation Investment, Clean Energy
I founded VitalSource's Planet Smart initiative and carbon neutrality pledge.
VitalSource
achieved
full carbon neutrality in 2023, saving 2.3 million trees per year compared to print and reducing
each student's carbon footprint by 45x versus a print textbook.
Bookshelf CoachMe Wins CODiE Award
2023
Tools used: Automatic Question Generation, Learning Science, VitalSource Bookshelf
Bookshelf CoachMe — VitalSource's AI-powered study coach — won the
2023
CODiE Award for “Best Use of Artificial Intelligence in Ed Tech.” Over 25 million
AI-generated practice questions answered by real students and counting.
Wordle Challenge
November 2021
Tools used: Gross Javascript, reverse-engineering hackery
Who could've guessed I would get obsessed with Wordle? Oh yeah - everyone. Back
when Wordle first got big, I reverse-engineered it and added two features: 1)
play infinite
random
Wordles and 2) set up a challenge link for a
tough word and
share it to
stump your
friends.
Investigating Automatically Generated Questions
2020-2021
Tools used: SpaCy, BERT, Transformers (Huggingface), Bookshelf
Helped lead R&D around automatic question generation from textbook content. Was a
published author on award-winning research paper proving our method works. Led productization
effort to launch at massive scale in VitalSource Bookshelf, which has since won multiple awards for
innovative use of AI in education.
Watkins or Not Watkins?
August 2017
Tools used: Python / Flask, Keras, Theano
Inspired by
Silicon Valley's
Not Hotdog, this simple app detects whether
an uploaded image is Watkins (the
Bookshelf
mascot) or not, using a convolutional neural network based on VGG16. Yeah, it's overkill. And yeah,
image models have come a
long way since 2017!
MetaSeek
2017-2019
Tools used: Python / Flask, React, AWS, MySQL
Source: MetaSeek on Github
Think outside the textbook
November 2016
Tools used: EPUB 3, Web Audio API, Firebase Realtime Database
Video of my talk at
Books in Browsers '16. Lots of fun demos in
this one, including three prototype chapters from a hypothetical highly interactive music textbook. This
was a really fun project to build, and an even more fun talk to give.
In C
November 2016
Tools used: Web Audio API, Firebase Realtime Database, MIDI.js
Source: Mind-size-bites on
Github
An explorable exploration looking at a famous piece of experimental music, "In C".
Including a collaborative, networked, educational concert performance.
Hebrides Overture
November 2016
Tools used: Web Audio API, Youtube API, Firebase Realtime Database, Device motion detection,
PDF.js
Source: Mind-size-bites
on Github
An aural and visual exploration of Mendelssohn's famous overture. Make sure to try
out conducting the piece (as it plays on your laptop) by waving around your phone to the beat.
Timbre - the color of sound
October 2016
Tools used: D3.js, Web Audio API
Source: Mind-size-bites
on Github
Timbre can perhaps best be described as the color of sound. Check out a
visualization of a trumpet or flute, then sing into your microphone to see your own voice in action.
Link-a-Day
June 2016
Tools used: Node / Express, Mailgun API, Heroku
Source: Link-a-Day on
Github
1) Send submit@mg.uptownnickbrown.com a 💯 link (with the URL in the subject line).
2) Get an anonymous 🔥 link back via email. 3) Reply to 💬 directly with whoever sent it in. I took this
offline a while ago, sorry!
EPUB2Vec
March 2016
Tools used: Python, word2vec, scikit-learn, EPUB 3
Source: EPUB2Vec on Github
Using Word2Vec, analyze which paragraphs of a set of ebooks are most similar to
each other. Useful for cross-linking, topic relevance and exploration. An example of an NLP project I
would approach very differently today.
Night Falls. A Storm Rolls In...
January 2016
Tools used: Hand-crafted, boutique, framework-free HTML, CSS, SVG & JS
Source: Riddler solutions on
Github
Diving deep into an interesting puzzle from
FiveThirtyEight
with an explorable explanation. I wish more educational content worked like this.
Asciify
January 2016
Tools used: Node / Express, Twitter API, ImageMagick, JP2A, AWS
Source: Asciify on Github
