The Playground is where I build things just to see how they work. Each game and tool here started as a question: Can a toddler learn letters with animal sounds? How fast can I react? What does the Stroop effect actually feel like? Some experiments turn into polished tools. Others stay as proof-of-concepts. Either way, the goal is the same: learn by building, share what works, and keep curiosity at the center.
All Games
What's Inside
Games & Tools
Each project below was built to explore a specific concept, from early childhood education to cognitive science.
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Izzy's Zoo Typing
A typing game designed for toddlers and preschoolers ages 3-5. Children press any letter on the keyboard and are rewarded with a corresponding animal friend — press A and an alligator appears, press Z and a zebra shows up. There are no timers, no scores, and no failure states. The game was built for my daughter Izzy as a way to explore whether very young children can build letter recognition through playful, pressure-free interaction with a real keyboard. It runs entirely in the browser with no dependencies, making it fast and accessible on any device.
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Reaction Time Test
A classic reaction time experiment translated to the web. The screen turns orange while you wait, then flips to green at a random interval. Click as fast as you can. The game measures your milliseconds and gives you feedback — lightning fast, great, good, or keep practicing. It is a simple demonstration of how browser-based JavaScript can be used for precise timing measurements, and it doubles as a fun competitive challenge. Try beating 200 milliseconds — that is roughly the upper bound of human visual reaction time.
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Memory Match
A digital take on the classic concentration card game. Eight pairs of emoji cards are shuffled face-down. Flip two at a time to find matches. The game tracks your progress and celebrates when you clear the board. Memory Match was built to explore state management patterns in React — specifically how to handle concurrent flip animations and match logic with hooks. It is also genuinely fun to play, and the emoji-based design makes it accessible to kids and adults alike.
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Color Match (Stroop Test)
The Stroop effect is one of the most famous demonstrations in cognitive psychology: when the name of a color is printed in a different color, your brain struggles to process the mismatch. This game implements the classic test — you must decide whether the color of the text or the word itself matches a target. It is harder than it sounds. The Color Match game was built as an experiment in translating well-known psychological paradigms into interactive web experiences.
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Speed Typing Challenge
A thirty-second typing sprint. Words appear one at a time and you type them as fast as you can. Your score is the number of correct words before the timer runs out. The game uses a simple vocabulary list and focuses on raw speed rather than accuracy drills. It was built to test real-time input handling in React and explore how game loops interact with React's state model. Challenge yourself to beat 30 words in 30 seconds.
Philosophy
Why Build a Playground?
The Playground exists because the best way to learn technology is to build things with it. Reading about React state management teaches you the theory. Building a memory game teaches you the practice — the edge cases, the timing bugs, the moments when state updates batch in unexpected ways. Every game on this page solved a real problem I was curious about, and each one taught me something I could not have learned from documentation alone.
There is also a simpler motivation: building things is fun. In a world where most of our work lives are spent maintaining systems someone else designed, there is something deeply satisfying about starting with a blank file and ending with something playable. The Playground is permission to experiment, to ship imperfect things, and to share them anyway.
If you are visiting this page, I encourage you to play the games, poke at the source code, and maybe build something of your own. The web is the most accessible platform ever created — you need nothing more than a text editor and a browser. Every project here started with someone deciding to type a few lines of code and see what happened. Yours can too.
Want to See More?
Check out the Lab for self-hosted services and infrastructure projects, or read the blog for deeper dives into technology and building.