I went to see a consultant, got some scans and reviewed the results. The consultant suggested I have surgery to insert a plate and screws into my neck to help it heal and to provide some stability. My insurance company was less than helpful and I couldn’t afford the surgery but then COVID hit and so I didn’t have the surgery – I left my neck in the hope that it would heal naturally.
This was the first thing that started to change my life.
Jump to January 2021 and I got COVID.
After having COVID for the first time in January 2021 (this was before I’d had any vaccinations) I started some personal development programs and one of the exercises I had to complete was on the topic of impact and contribution. The question I had to answer was – “what is going to be said about you at your funeral in your eulogy”.
My business was struggling and I realised the work I was doing wasn’t actually having any real positive impact and I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. I then began thinking about how I could make a positive impact on the world and how I could use the skills and experience I had collected.
My partner is an elementary/primary school teacher and I have 2 nephews, both 8, and a niece, 7, who play videogames. At home my partner and I were always discussing her class (she teaches 8-9 years old), their interests and the lessons she had done during the day. We also regularly talked about the planning she did for upcoming lessons and there was an instance where she needed to create a lesson plan for math on the topic of perimeter. I knew her class were all interested in the videogame Among Us and so I suggested creating a lesson plan related to the game. Among Us is a game where part of it has you and other players complete tasks in different rooms on a spaceship and other locations. 30 minutes later we had a lesson plan asking the students to design new rooms in the spaceship and calculate the perimeter of the rooms while working within some constraints like the maximum size/length the perimeter could be for each room and for all rooms combined.
The next day I got a Whatsapp message from my partner about the math lesson and it simply said – “they love this Among Us stuff”. It even had one of those emojis with the monkey and the hands over the eyes.
This was when I knew I could use my experience in the videogame industry to create learning resources to support children and how ClassBridges was created. ClassBridges creates math resources based on popular videogames to help engage children and boost their math grades.