Terra Symposium

The question

Terra started in a school philosophy club: could students explore difficult questions by making choices and seeing how those choices play out? The early work used a political simulation to make ethics, systems, and civic life easier to discuss together.

The project’s challenge was to keep the complexity of the questions while making the experience approachable enough for a classroom.

From club to learning platform

The product connects facilitator-led discussion with interactive scenarios and a growing library of lesson material. Instead of giving students a single answer, it creates a structured space to compare perspectives, make decisions, and talk through consequences.

Terra’s story has moved through several forms: a student club, live workshops, and digital learning experiences that teachers can bring into their own classrooms.

• Frame a big social question as a sequence of choices students can reason about.
• Use interaction to make abstract systems visible and discussable.
• Keep the facilitator and the conversation central to the experience.

My contribution

I co-founded Terra and worked across the learning product and its software: translating workshop ideas into interactive experiences, building and refining the platform, and staying close to how students and educators use it.

The work taught me to move between product questions and implementation details without losing sight of the people who will use the result.

What it became

Terra’s public materials describe a library of more than 600 interactive lessons. In 2022, Terra Symposium received the national iAwards People’s Choice Award. Those are team outcomes built with collaborators and educators over time.

The measure I come back to is whether a learner can leave with a better question, not just another screen to click.