"I'm a 4th grade teacher who writes educational software for my students.
I wanted a free alternative to the many expensive adaptive computer math courses available to students. I built a flexible math activity system based on interactive manipulatives that would load with different values every time. Then I built over 200 over those activities, representing the breadth of a 4th grade curriculum. Then I designed an adaptive algorithm to guide students through the applets based on their performance.
Then it was time for the "fun" part. I wanted to create an incentive structure for the software, so I designed a turn-based spaceship battle game, framed in a text adventure, in which the player, a sentient ship, protects an isolated space station from marauding aliens."