Designing learning experiences where understanding emerges through interaction
Creating educational games and tools that transformed complex learning objectives into intuitive experiences, helping millions of students build civic knowledge through play.
Company: Filament Games
Client: iCivics
Role: Creative Direction, Product Design, UX
Founded by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, iCivics set out to transform civic education through interactive learning. Working with Filament Games, I helped design multiple games and learning tools that turned complex educational objectives into engaging product experiences. By approaching each project as an interaction design challenge rather than a content problem, the work contributed to a platform that now reaches more than 9 million students annually, supports 145,000 teachers, and has surpassed 200 million plays.
The Challenge
iCivics believes students learn civics best by experiencing it. Instead of asking students to memorize government processes or legal concepts, the platform challenges them to actively explore how those systems work through interactive products.
That vision creates a unique product challenge. Educational games have to accomplish two goals at once: they must be genuinely engaging while still achieving measurable learning outcomes. Lean too far toward education and the experience becomes little more than a quiz. Lean too far toward entertainment and students may enjoy playing without understanding the lesson.
At Filament Games, we often referred to this trap as "chocolate-covered broccoli": wrapping traditional instruction in game mechanics without changing how learning actually happens. Every project began with the same question: how do you design interactions where the act of playing naturally reinforces the learning objective?
The Approach
As the lead technical artist on multiple iCivics projects, I partnered closely with game designers to transform learning objectives into complete product experiences, helping shape everything from early interaction models and paper prototypes through UX, visual systems, implementation, and final delivery.
Rather than beginning with features or interfaces, we started with behavior. If students needed to understand a concept, the interaction itself needed to require that understanding.
On Immigration Nation, for example, I helped redesign what could have been a simple multiple-choice exercise into a navigation system where players plotted routes to guide immigrant ships safely to their correct destinations. That single interaction created a flexible gameplay system that naturally supported increasing complexity, introducing obstacles, route optimization, and puzzle mechanics while continually reinforcing the underlying lesson.
The same thinking carried across every project, whether designing interactive writing tools like Drafting Board or supporting games such as Do I Have a Right? and Win the White House. Different products required different mechanics, but they all shared the same goal: making learning emerge through interaction rather than instruction.
The Outcome
The products helped establish iCivics as one of the most widely used civic education platforms in the United States, now reaching more than 9 million students annually, supporting 145,000 teachers, and surpassing 200 million total plays. Independent research has shown iCivics experiences contribute to a 26% increase in civic knowledge, a 36% increase in civic dispositions, and 95% of teachers report higher student engagement.
Students using Drafting Board were found to be 62% more likely to write essays rated "excellent" than students who completed the same work without the tool.
That principle shaped every product I worked on and continues to influence how I approach product design today.
“The best educational experiences don't teach through instruction. They teach through participation.”