Designing with Love

Flashcards can teach chess openings, but they can also crush your will to practice. Jackie sat down with Dan Leeson, the creator of Chessferatu, a gothic chess training game that makes opening practice feel like play by changing the objective from “win the match” to “survive the sequence.” Dan shares how his own frustration with repetitive study, plus an ADHD brain that refuses to stay bored, pushed him to design a game loop with real stakes, fast feedback, and the kind of momentum that keeps...

Hybrid work has changed the ground rules for training, and most learning designs still act like everyone is sitting in the same room. When we do that, remote learners get a smaller slice of the experience: the side conversations they can’t hear, the whiteboard they can’t see, the questions they can’t easily ask, and the participation that never quite opens up. We start with a future-ready signal backed by Gallup data showing hybrid work is now a stable reality for remote-capable roles....

Grades can look great while real-world readiness quietly falls apart. Jackie sat down with Rob Heller, founder of the Boost Program and author of The Missing Course for Today’s Youth, to dig into the skills schools often assume students already have and why that assumption is costing young people in relationships, mental health, and career growth. Rob breaks down “soft skills” for what they really are: hard, learnable life skills made up of micro-skills. We talk about why teamwork, leadershi...

In this episode, Jackie walks through what she calls Microlearning 2.0, which is a future-ready approach that treats microlearning as small, purposeful learning moments that help people understand, practice, remember, or apply something useful. We talk about why this matters for adult learners in busy workplaces and higher education, especially when someone needs help at the moment of need. Instead of replaying an entire course, a learner may only need a checklist before a difficult conversat...

AI can produce a polished paragraph in seconds, but that doesn’t mean students are learning to write. Jackie sat down with Michael Leggs, a college professor and the founder of Smartleby, to unpack a more useful way to think about artificial intelligence in education: not as a replacement for writers, but as a revision tutor that helps writers grow. Along the way, we dig into what “authentic voice” and academic integrity look like when AI tools are everywhere, and why writing still matters be...