I resisted AI longer than I should have.
We had built something genuinely ambitious but it wasn’t a game-changer.
Students could walk through the streets of colonial Boston in the days before the Massacre. They could confront figures of the Protestant Reformation in immersive 3D environments.
They were stepping into history, making choices, living inside the story. Multiple art awards. Students loved it.
But underneath the beauty, the learning mechanics hadn’t changed.
Students would hit a decision point and pick A, B, or C. Or write a short response that got sent to a teacher to grade later.
Nothing they wrote changed what happened next.
The truth? We had built the most expensive worksheet in education.
Why? Because I had every objection higher ed has right now. I didn’t trust AI with learning.
I didn’t trust it to interact with students.
I held onto those instincts while I kept shipping the same product with nicer graphics.
Sound familiar? 91% of campus administrators use AI. Confidence that it’s helping students learn just dropped 10 points.
Institutions use AI for enrollment forecasting while avoiding the place it matters most: how students think.
Meanwhile students deploy their own AI to undermine their own learning.
When I finally broke the dam, everything changed.
The story world we’d spent years building suddenly came alive.
Now when a student responds, the AI assesses their reasoning and the entire plot changes based on how they think.
Vague? A character pushes back. Strong argument? The scenario escalates. Miss key evidence? The story forces you to confront it.
We went from “The Boston Massacre was bad because soldiers shot civilians” to students arguing that Captain Preston’s order to hold fire was eroding his authority with his own men — and that the real threat wasn’t the mob, it was a mutiny from inside the ranks — then defending that position against an AI prosecutor building a murder case.
Higher ed doesn’t have an AI adoption problem. It has an AI courage problem.
Whether you teach it or lead it, DM me a course. We’ll hop on a call and I’ll build a simulation for you in 48 hours. See for yourself what breaks the dam.