Teaching
Teaching is the thread that runs through everything else I have done. Some of it was formal university instruction, some was training researchers to use tools I wrote, and a long stretch of it was on a ski hill.
University
Course Director, PSYC 3280 Animal Behaviour, York University, 2017. A third-year undergraduate course with an enrolment over 200. I built the whole thing: curriculum, content, materials, and textbook selection. Student ratings came in well above the department average, and I can share them on request.
Teaching Assistant, York University Psychology, 2009 to 2018. Twelve courses over nine years, including Introductory Psychology six times, Advanced Research Methods three times, and Evolutionary Psychology twice. I won the Council of Canadian Departments of Psychology Teaching Assistantship Award in 2013.
Private tutor, statistics and research methods, 2009 to present. More than 200 undergraduate and graduate students, many of them with special needs. Statistics is the course people arrive at convinced they cannot do, which makes it the most satisfying one to teach.
Workshops and industry training
VISTA professional development workshops, York University, 2017 to 2018. Multi-day sessions for researchers from institutions internationally, taking people with no background from hardware and software basics to building a VR study themselves.
AI enablement workshops, Big Viking Games, 2026 to present. Internal sessions for the engineering department on agentic coding workflows, delegating work to autonomous agents, and the versioned guideline layer that keeps AI output reviewable.
Internal seminars, Wizards of the Coast, 2021 to 2023. Monthly sessions for the engineering team on tools, process, software architecture, and coding practice.
Lab training, Centre for Vision Research, 2018 to 2021. Day-to-day mentoring of graduate and undergraduate students, plus toolkit tutorials for international audiences using bmlTUX.
Outreach talks at Indonesian primary schools near the Kutai field site, on primate conservation.
Developing engineers
The management half of teaching looks nothing like a classroom, and it works better scheduled than improvised.
Monthly one-to-ones, in every lead role I have held. Each report gets a monthly meeting carrying two personal growth goals. Feedback runs both directions, and the goals double as a running record of where someone's career is heading. I match them against work the business needs done, so development time pays for itself rather than competing with delivery.
Weekly company-wide knowledge sharing, Big Viking Games. A team member teaches the rest of the company something they learned that week. The point is moving knowledge across team boundaries instead of letting it pool inside one.
Quarterly milestone celebrations, Big Viking Games. Every quarter closes on something real, an internal or external demo, and then we mark it together. Anchoring the celebration to a deliverable is what keeps it from becoming a calendar ritual.
Snowboarding
Director, Snowboard School, Uplands Golf and Ski Centre, 2006 to 2019, after four seasons as an instructor. I ran everything: hiring, training, and scheduling a staff of over 40, and designing all lesson programs and curriculum to Canada-wide standards. I taught more than 1,000 students, aged 4 and up, at every ability level, and ran the apprentice program that turns younger snowboarders into instructors. Level 2 certified with the Canadian Association of Snowboard Instructors.
This is where I learned most of what I know about teaching, and about running a team. Getting a nervous adult down a hill and getting a junior engineer through their first architecture decision have more in common than either group would like to hear.
How I think about it
I believe the best teachers inspire curiosity, foster critical thinking, and guide students to reach their own conclusions. This helps them build confidence and a lasting love for learning.
I emphasize transparency, frequent low-stakes assessments for continuous feedback, and empathetic support to help students stay on track without feeling overwhelmed.
Overall, I aim to create an inclusive, respectful environment where students feel engaged and intrinsically motivated to grow.
Subjects I can teach
Statistics · Data science · Math up to calculus · Machine learning and AI · Computer science · Programming · Game development · Geographic information systems · Psychology · Animal behaviour and zoology