She Dropped Her PhD to Build Video Games That Save Coral Reefs and Nobody Told Her No

I literally cried laughing during this recording!

Okay so this episode, I talked to Lindsey Tropf, founder and CEO of Immersed Games. Her dream project is literally the thing she already built, games where kids solve a food crisis by learning genetics or fix a bleaching coral reef. Ten years into building it and she still says it like it surprises her a little too.

Before Immersed Games she was working on a PhD in education, dissertation and everything, on game based learning. Never finished it. Started the company instead. Said academia moved too slow for her, other grad students literally asked her to slow down because they didn’t want to keep her pace, and she got laughed at for wanting to scale things up. Bad fit. So she left and built her own thing.

This is the best part. She used to be a guild leader in World of Warcraft, running 40 person raids back in the day. And she said that’s where she accidentally built her whole mental model. Raiding taught her metacognition, strategy, group failure and adjusting. Then she gets into her PhD program and they’re teaching her all these best practices for gifted students, and she keeps raising her hand going, but that’s good for all students. Over and over. Annoyed her professor the entire class.

She also texted a friend every single day for three months, what horrible thing did you learn about the public school system today. Her takeaway wasn’t that teachers are the problem. It’s the system.

She told me about being a freshman in high school, showing up genuinely excited to talk about something she read for homework, and looking around the classroom realizing nobody else cared at all. She called herself the weirdo who kept that curiosity. That disappointment basically became her whole career.

I told her about my own school project, a whole mad scientist scenario built around non Euclidean geometry, because I’d read some outer space metaphysics book way outside what a kid should be reading. Got an F. She said if that happened in her classroom it would’ve made her year. Said she once had two kids almost get in a fistfight debating something she brought into class and thought, I’m so good at this. Then had to actually break it up.

Her whole philosophy is that games shouldn’t be flashcards with a reward slapped on. The game is there to build a shared meaningful context, a reason to actually care. Her proof of concept moment, a student got so into their ecology simulator that he made an outside guide figuring out the actual math behind it. That’s the whole goal. Not compliance, obsession.

She pushed back hard when I brought up the classic game based learning line about kids not realizing they’re learning. Said she vehemently disagrees with that as a goal. Her point is just that kids only recognize “learning” when it looks like memorizing facts, so when they’re building arguments from evidence instead, they don’t call it learning even though it obviously is. That’s a branding problem, not a design win.

She told me one of the more surprising outcomes from their studies, girls ended up learning more than boys and closing some of the gaps. People worried that games would turn girls off. Opposite happened.

Their first product was a messy sandbox ecosystem builder. Didn’t get used much, too demanding for one teacher managing 30 kids. What worked were tight 15 to 20 minute quest experiences tied to a specific objective. But even then, after years of building they’d only covered about half of middle school science on their own. So they pivoted to partnering with curriculum companies instead, letting those partners scale the reach while Immersed handles the pedagogy.

This one got me. They built a game teaching mean, as in the math concept, using boba tea orders. Kid played it, walked out and told her teacher she felt really smart. That teacher had tears in his eyes. Said that student struggles constantly and had never said anything like that before. That’s the whole mission in one moment.

I asked how she balances measurable standards against the softer human growth side, and she basically said the question assumes a conflict that isn’t real. She designs around the practices, the thinking skills, the lenses kids use to look at the world, and just lets the content fill in around that. Content and empowerment aren’t competing goals to her. Same thing, done well.

She was blunt about this. They didn’t go looking for places to bolt AI on. They had one specific problem, middle schoolers writing IDK instead of real answers during classroom discourse activities, and it took AI to actually sort and surface real student ideas for a teacher to use in a class discussion. That’s it. She made fun of the FETC conference where half the booths were just a wrapper on ChatGPT and nobody could say what their product actually did. Hers has a job.

Her hope for the next five to ten years is more self-directed learning set in context that actually matters to the learner, not just the teacher. She circled all the way back to that freshman year disappointment, the point of all of this is making sure that curiosity never gets killed off in the first place.

immersedgames.com or tytoonline.com, same destination either way. She’s mostly working with curriculum companies right now rather than schools directly since building an experience still takes about two full days in their studio. But she’s building a list of educators who want to pilot things, especially some new math work in progress. Find her on LinkedIn too.

Go listen to the full episode. And if you’ve got a bold idea you want to build, that’s what the Thinkering Collective Fellowship is for. Visit www.thinkeringcollective.org.

That’s my recap. Told you it was good.