Digital adventures

Pizzo Easy School Stuffs is a free hub of small games and tools for school, no sign-up, no names, nothing collected. Open it and you get a wall of cards sorted by level, Pre-K and K through College and Everyone, each one a different skill: Math Sprint and Times Tables for arithmetic, Count and Compare and Clock Corner for younger kids, Spelling Builder and Word Wise for vocabulary, Algebra Arena and Element Explorer for middle and high school, a Ghana Quiz on regions and history, College Test Practice in the style of the SAT and ACT, Money Smarts, a coding puzzle called Pizzo Robot, and reference tools like Printable Worksheets, Story Time, Study Guides, Flashcards, a Study Planner, and an Exam Countdown. Everything here runs in the browser tab and can be added to a phone's home screen to work offline.

Two of the cards, PanelPrep and Pizzo School Compass, are marked "opens a separate app" because they are bigger tools that live on their own sites. The recording below follows both.

PanelPrep: a mock defense panel

Clicking the PanelPrep card opens panelprep-mu.vercel.app, a graduate defense and interview simulator. You start by picking what you are preparing for, a thesis or dissertation defense, an academic job interview, a comprehensive exam defense, or a scholarship or fellowship interview. The clip picks Comprehensive Exam Defense, then feeds it a reading list, either your own file or the built-in sample, a short accountability and governance reading list used to build the questions the panel will ask.

From there it drops you into a live session with a four-person panel, The Friendly Mentor, The Methodologist, The Theorist, and Dr. Chair, each with its own icon and a "panel mood" bar that shifts as the session goes. Dr. Chair opens with "If you had to explain your study to a smart friend outside your field, what would you say?" and the app listens through the browser's own speech tools, transcribing the spoken answer live into the text box with a running timer and word count. A follow-up question, "Why do you say that?", comes right after, pressing on the same point rather than moving on to something new. The recording answers both out loud, about civic reporting and flooding and littering complaints in Ghana having no real channel to reach the people who could act on them, which is the same problem CivicConnect was built to solve.

Pizzo School Compass: a planner for the rest of the term

Back on the hub, the Pizzo School Compass card opens campus-compass-six-xi.vercel.app, a student planner with its own sidebar: Today, Tasks, Calendar, Courses, Grades, Focus, Money, Notes, Career, and Essentials. The clip lands on its "How to use" page, which explains each one in a line, Today is the daily view of what is due, Grades turns a score into your running GPA and what you still need to hit a target, Focus is a study timer that logs a weekly streak, Money tracks spending against a budget, and Essentials is a checklist of the things students forget, fee deadlines, add or drop dates, backups. The same page covers getting reminders, adding the app to a phone's home screen so it works like a native app, and a short note on privacy, that everything typed in stays saved to that one browser and is never sent anywhere.

Seen together, the three are really one idea in three sizes: Easy School Stuffs is the shelf, built to be browsed in under a minute and used once; PanelPrep and Pizzo School Compass are the two tools on it big enough to need a session of their own, one for a single high-stakes conversation, the other for keeping up with a whole term. None of the three ask for a name, an account, or a server to hold what you type, which was the point of building them this way.

Bible Battle is a game I built for International Christian Fellowship at Ohio University, the church group I am part of. It is a Bible trivia and games platform for a room full of people on their phones, the kind of thing you would run after a service or at a youth night, instead of one person quizzing from a printed sheet.

The host opens it on a laptop connected to a projector, creates a room, and gets a four-letter code and a QR code to show the room. Everyone else just opens the site on their own phone, types in the code or scans it, and they are in, no app, no account. The host picks a game, Teams or Individual, sets how long and how many teams, and presses start. A leaderboard tracks scores live as people answer, and scores can carry across several games in one sitting or reset for a fresh round.

There is more than one way to play. Bible Trivia Battle covers people, places, parables, miracles, and the major seasons like Easter and Christmas. Bible Lessons walks kids through a story from Genesis to Revelation, then quizzes them on it. Emoji Bible Charades turns a Bible story into a string of emoji to guess. True or False is quick-fire. Who Said It matches a quote to the person who said it. Finish the Verse and Memory Verse Challenge test how well you know the actual text. Books of the Bible and Put It in Order are about structure and sequence. Bible Feud is a Family-Feud-style guessing game, Escape Room gives teams riddles to solve against the clock, and My Own Quiz lets a host paste in their own questions for a custom round.

The clip shows both sides of it: hosting a room from the laptop, picking Bible Trivia Battle, and watching an Easter question come in and settle on the leaderboard, then switching to the lobby to show how someone joins with the room code and QR, and how many other game modes are sitting there ready to pick. It is a smaller build than CivicQuest or CivicConnect, no accounts, no database of reports, just a room code and a shared screen, but it is the same basic idea in a different setting: take something people already do in person and give it a shared, visible scoreboard.

I have been very biased in this class, and I will just say that plainly. Three digital adventures in, and all three are tools I built myself: CivicQuest, CivicConnect, and now this one. I am basically acting like a philosopher who only reviews his own books and finds each one brilliant, if that makes sense. So take what follows with that in mind.

PizzoStatPrep is a self-paced statistics course I built. It is meant to take someone from knowing nothing about statistics to being ready for a job that uses it. The lessons are written in plain English instead of textbook language, and they run from the basics, what a variable is, mean, median, that kind of thing, up through harder topics like regression, A/B testing, time series, causal inference, and Bayesian statistics. There are about 20 modules in total, and each one comes with real R code you can actually run, not just theory on a page.

The clip walks through a quiz in the Statistics Foundations module. Every question comes with a difficulty tag and a points value, so getting one right earns you XP the way a game would, and getting one wrong shows you the explanation right there instead of just marking it wrong and moving on. Past the lessons and quizzes, there is an Interview Question Bank: real interview questions from quantitative roles in academia, industry, and consulting, sorted by topic, regression, hypothesis testing, SQL, machine learning, and more, each with a difficulty tag. The idea is to read the question, try to answer it in your head first, then reveal the model answer, instead of just reading answers you never had to produce yourself. There are also badges for progress and a glossary for terms you forget. It is free to start, and a premium tier unlocks the full question banks and the complete interview-prep library. The whole thing is one codebase that ships as both a website and a native Android app.

CivicQuest is the game version of a real platform. CivicConnect Ghana is the civic reporting tool it is modeled on, and the one at the center of my dissertation. This walkthrough covers both sides of it: a citizen submitting a community report, and the accountability dashboard that tracks what comes in.

How CivicConnect Ghana works

The platform is built around three public tabs. Citizen is where a report starts. You pick a region and constituency, choose an issue type such as drainage and flooding, road damage, wrong parking, littering, or water supply, set how urgent it is, and add at least two photos and a location, either dropped on a map or typed in. A phone number is the only login. There is no account to create. You use that same number later to track the report's status, and once it is marked resolved, to rate how satisfied you were with the response. Every resolved report earns 5 credits.

Voice is a public feed, closer to a community timeline than a form. Citizens post and comment on it, and the MP or assembly member for a constituency can post project updates there too, so requests from citizens and updates from officials sit in the same public channel instead of two separate systems.

Accountability is the scorecard. It ranks every constituency by how many reports it has received, how many it has resolved, how it handles high-urgency reports specifically, and the average number of days a report stays open before it is closed. Nobody has to log in to see it, and it updates as new reports come in, so a constituency's record is sitting there in public rather than something a citizen has to request.

What a citizen submits in a minute on the Citizen tab is what shows up, almost immediately, as a number on someone's scorecard. That link between an individual report and a public, running record of how a district is doing is the part my dissertation studies: whether making that link visible changes how citizens see government accountability, not just whether they will use an app.

CivicQuest Ghana is a game I built in Unity. It runs in a web browser, so there is nothing to install and it is free to try. I built it as a companion to CivicConnect Ghana, the civic reporting platform in my dissertation. You can play it right here on this page.

A quick tour

CivicQuest Ghana is a game about looking after your neighbourhood. You play as one of a few characters, such as Kwame Mensah or Ama Serwaa, an ordinary person on a busy market street in the Ridgeview district. The street is in a bad way. Rubbish sits in the gutters, the road is cracked, the lamps are dead, and people do not trust each other. Your job is to turn it around, one small decision at a time.

You walk around and talk to people. A market trader, an elder, a driver, a student, a local official. Each one has something on their mind and a choice for you to make. Do you report the contractor who is cutting corners, or pocket the envelope he slides across the table? Do you help the trader move her stall off the pavement, or walk past? Every answer nudges the street one way or the other.

Five things are tracked the whole time you play: how clean the street is, how safe it feels, how much people trust each other, how honest things are, and how good the roads and pipes are. The game never stops to give you a test. It just watches what you choose. As the numbers climb, the street changes around you. The rubbish clears, the road gets paved, the lights come on, the shops get a fresh coat of paint, and the label at the bottom of the screen moves from "Neglected" to "Improving".

Do enough good and people start to notice you. You rise from ordinary citizen to community organizer, then assembly member, then member of parliament, and finally minister. Each step gives you more power to fix things, and it also brings people who want to buy your vote. The higher you go, the harder the choices get.

How to play

• Move: the W, A, S, D keys
• Look around: move the mouse
• Talk to someone or pick something up: press E when you are close
• Get into a taxi, okada, trotro, or police car: stand next to it and press E. Press G to start a job as a police officer, taxi driver, bus driver, or delivery person.

That is really all of it. Walk up to someone, hear them out, choose an answer, and watch the street react. A full run of the current build takes about ten to fifteen minutes. There is no timer and no way to lose, so you can wander, try things, and see what happens.

See it in action

The clip follows a session on the market street: taking on small jobs, talking to people and choosing how to answer, earning a promotion to community organizer, and later driving the trotro on a transit run while the district slowly gets better.

What it could teach

The strongest fit is social studies and citizenship. Players see how local government works, how a reported problem travels to someone who can act on it, what assembly members, MPs, district chief executives, and the police actually do, and how public money forces hard choices. The bribe and lobby choices at the higher roles bring in civic ethics, asking players to weigh personal gain against the public good and to notice how more power brings more temptation. The cleanliness meter and the visible cleanup connect environmental and sanitation lessons to everyday action. There is reading and writing practice in the dialogue, and more if a teacher asks students to write out or argue the choices. Because the meters affect each other and a new district starts partly reset, the game also shows how progress builds up and then has to be kept up.

How it connects to the readings

Van Eck (2015) argues that the question is no longer whether games teach but what they teach, how, and for whom, and he points to building the assessment into the game itself. In CivicQuest the meters are the assessment. The game never stops for a quiz. It reads a civic disposition from the choices a player builds up over time, which is the competency, evidence, and task idea in practice, and the same thing I am doing in CivicConnect. His caution about "digital natives" also fits my situation. My students grew up with phones but not with games as a way to learn, so I cannot assume the game teaches itself. Koster (2013) describes fun as the moment you grasp a pattern. The pattern here is the loop of choice, meter, a visible change in the street, and then new options, and where that loop is tight the build is genuinely fun. Where it runs out of content it stops being fun, which tells me where to build next. Mishra (2020) is a reminder that every tool carries assumptions and that its benefits are not shared evenly. This build decides what counts as good citizenship through what the meters reward, and its need for a laptop quietly leaves out the phone only users who matter most to the civic problem I care about. Saying that plainly is part of using the game honestly.