Beyond GIS

Generating high-quality, standards-aligned practice materials is one of the most time-consuming parts of teaching math. howe2math automates it. The platform handles everything from problem bank design to payment processing to email delivery — built to solve a problem I deal with every day.

The stack is FastAPI on the backend, PostgreSQL via Neon for the database, Cloudflare R2 for file storage, Stripe for payments, Clerk for authentication, Railway for hosting, and Resend for transactional email. Every component was chosen deliberately — serverless-friendly, cost-effective at low traffic, and replaceable without rewriting everything around it.

The architecture that built howe2math — relational database design, REST API structure, working with structured data at scale — transfers directly to GIS data pipelines and web mapping backends. The problems are the same; the data just has coordinates.

DOKtor is a standalone public-facing tool within the howe2math ecosystem. Teachers upload or photograph a math problem and DOKtor returns a Depth of Knowledge (DOK) level classification with confidence scores across all four levels.

The UI leans into a medical theme — "Diagnosis," "Examine," "Prescription" — which turned out to fit the use case well. A teacher submits a problem, DOKtor examines it, and returns a structured classification with confidence breakdowns.

A hub of browser-based math tools I built for Lynn English High School — for my own classroom and for my colleagues across the math department — free, no logins, no installs. Students and teachers get a single home for practice, reference, and prep, all static HTML with no build step.

The centerpiece is an MCAS dashboard: a searchable, filterable bank of 1,386 released MCAS items with faceted filters (year, course, chapter, DOK, reporting category), a worksheet builder that prints answer-free sheets and matching answer keys, and DESE performance data at the school, district, and state level. Around it sits a suite of utilities — a graphing tool, geometry and slope explorers, a formula reference, vocabulary drills, a quadratic solver, random group and student pickers, bellwork, and classroom timers.

A GIS-integrated curriculum unit for middle schoolers built around the story of Samuel Bellamy and the Whydah — the most significant pirate shipwreck in American archaeological history. The unit connects to the Real Pirates traveling exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem and uses the wreck's discovery as a vehicle for teaching how spatial thinking evolves across centuries.

The cartographic thread at the center of the unit is what makes it work: Cyprian Southack's 1717 chart of the wreck site was used in the immediate aftermath of the sinking to coordinate salvage efforts. Barry Clifford used that same chart — updated with modern bathymetric data and sonar survey techniques — to locate the wreck in 1984. The 267-year chain from Southack's hand-drawn survey to Clifford's sonar grid is a GIS story told without calling it one.

Currently in active development for an upcoming summer engagement.

A growing collection of browser games I've built from scratch in vanilla JavaScript — no engine, no framework. The suite gathers them into one place: Bug Wars, an Age-of-Empires-style real-time strategy game about ant and bee colonies; Whydah: First Sail, a wind-and-current navigation game tracing Black Sam Bellamy's 1717 voyage; Flip Game, an installable bottle-flip party game; and TappyMaps, a map designer with built-in geography games.

More games are in development. The suite is built to grow — each game is a self-contained app, surfaced from a single hub.