Hands-on physics for 3,000+ students a semester

The situation

Intro physics at ASU's scale means thousands of students a semester, in person and online, who all need experiments that work and labs that are taught and assessed the same way. Years later, ASU's design school needed a course on where XR and AI meet, a field that changes month to month.

What I did

• Led design and construction of dozens of physical and virtual experiments, from optics and diffraction to Rubens tubes and Galton boards.
• Taught online 100-level physics labs to hundreds of students a term, and supported lectures reaching 3,000+ students a semester.
• Kept a large instrumentation inventory running (oscilloscopes, power supplies, cryogenics) and trained students and faculty to use it.
• Led the department's outreach, including physics shows for the public.
• Alongside the labs, built and researched immersive learning with ASU's Embodied Games Lab and Dreamscape Learn.
• As a Faculty Associate (Herberger Institute, School of Arts, Media & Engineering), designed and taught the graduate studio Hyperspace: Exploration at the Intersection of XR and AI, owning curriculum, assessment and critique.

What changed

• Two ASU Physics Staff Awards (2017, 2021).
• A semester-long, project-based studio with industry guests, frontier tools and a responsible, safety-first design practice.
• The pattern I still use at Zillow: build the thing, then teach it hands-on until people use it on their own.