Math Game

The CAL Package

In 10th grade, I was selected to represent my school in a competition at the Visvesvaraya Industrial & Technological Museum in Bengaluru (Karnataka, India). My task was to build a Computer Aided Learning (CAL) package using GW-Basic. I was paired with with a random student from another school and assigned the topic of Matrices. It was hardly the most exciting subject for a teenager, but the process was transformative.

I sought the aid of my school Head Mistress who was also my math teacher and notoriously strict. Her genuine investment in my work showed me a side of her I had never seen. I learned to appreciate both teaching methods and her demeanor more through that experience.

The project was not without drama. A day before judging, a virus swept through the museum's computers, forcing a destructive restore.I lost a significant portion of my code and had to scramble to rewrite it. The rushed version was buggy and I walked away without a trophy. Despite that, I realized I enjoyed the process of building things, especially tools that made learning visual.

The Silly Idea Box

Years later, when my child was in 6th grade, I tried to pass that spark along. We built a simple multiplication game together using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I wanted to show the magic in the browser and how it could easily be manipulated through developer tools.

While I’m not sure if the kid was as hooked as I was, the project stayed with me. I jotted down a vision for it in a metaphorical idea box. I wanted the experience to be calm, immersive, and focused. It needed to be free from addictive dopamine hits of modern gaming.

From Boredom to Coding with AI

That idea sat on the shelf for years. Then came 2025. Feeling bored and restricted by limited AI tooling at work I started exploring new IDEs. I experimented with both spec-driven coding and vibe coding workflows using AI to occupy my time. I pulled that old math game out of the box. With a feedback loop from my now-college-aged child, the project finally felt real.

To fully realize the vision, it had to live beyond my local machine. My professional experience in bringing systems into production made deploying this via AWS Amplify a breeze.

Math Game

What began in 10th grade as a fascination with building educational tools in GW-BASIC has manifested into a live reality at: Code | Live Demo

This game is different from the original matrix project, but the drive to build it is the same. It might be a childish silliness, but it is my silliness, thirty years in the making.