A Portfolio of Digital Artifacts

Education

I began, quite fittingly, in a small place beneath a wide Wyoming sky at Worland High School, where the mountains whispered and the teachers did their best to compete with them. I was a thinker then—perhaps a wanderer in denim—more interested in the questions behind the questions than the answers printed on the quiz. Looking back, that period was less about acquiring knowledge and more about becoming aware of the kind of life I hoped to live. Somewhere during those years, a mentor named Tim McGee helped plant the idea that I might one day become a teacher myself. The path there, however, was far from direct. It would take another twelve years before I discovered that technology and computer science were the subjects through which I could best connect curiosity, creativity, and education.

Growing up around computers of every kind sparked an early fascination with software, hardware, systems, and digital tools. That curiosity eventually led me to the University of Phoenix—a place where learning required equal parts discipline, adaptability, and persistence. There, I earned a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology and a Master of Arts in Education, but more importantly, I learned how education must often bend and evolve around the realities of life rather than pretend those realities do not exist.

Beyond formal degrees, my education never truly stopped. Certifications, workshops, teaching credentials, late-night YouTube rabbit holes, philosophical books with too many footnotes, conversations, failures, experiments—all of them became part of a larger architecture of ongoing curiosity. I never pursued education simply to collect credentials. I pursued it to remain awake, adaptable, and engaged with the world. Over time, I came to realize something both simple and difficult: the journey itself is the lesson.

Teaching

Projects

Projects are where curiosity becomes tangible. Each application, experiment, curriculum tool, visualization, or creative system on this page began with a question: What would happen if this idea were explored a little further? Some projects emerged from classroom needs, others from personal fascination, musical experimentation, philosophical reflection, or the simple desire to build something useful and beautiful.

I rarely approach projects as finished products. Most are evolving systems—iterative, imperfect, and constantly teaching me something new about design, communication, problem solving, or human behavior. Many begin as small prototypes and gradually expand into larger ecosystems shaped by feedback, failure, and refinement. In that sense, the process itself becomes part of the artifact.

Across these builds, certain themes continue to reappear: creativity through structure, visual clarity, accessibility, systems thinking, music, education, reflection, and interaction. Whether I am building classroom tools, collaborative music systems, adaptive learning environments, or strange experimental visualizers, the deeper goal remains the same: to create experiences that help people think, explore, connect, and make meaning.

PulseTap

PulseTap is a pocket-friendly musical interface for people who hear ideas while walking. Tap, sway, move, and capture scale-based musical phrases before they disappear.

View on GitHub

GPA Calculator

Maybe as a freshman who just had a rough first year, you’re probably feeling stressed about your GPA and wondering if you can still hit a 3.5 or even a 3.2 by the time your a senior. Let’s break down the EstimateYourGrade app in a way that’s super clear and hopeful, focusing on how it can help you figure out if those goals are possible.

View on GitHub

SongMaker

Tired of wasting rehearsal time on half-baked song ideas? SongMaker’s your fix. This web app spits out song structures, lyric starters, and chord progressions based on your genre and vibe. Plug in “grunge” or “pop,” set a mood, and get a blueprint we can actually jam to. Share drafts, tweak on the fly, and cut the chaos. Mode Explorer and Mode Explorer 2

View on GitHub

File Duplicate Detector

Tired of déjà vu in your digital turn-ins? The File Duplication Detector is your classroom's secret weapon against copycat chaos! With a sleek, teacher-friendly interface, this web app sniffs out sneaky duplicates by comparing content hashes, timestamps, file sizes, and even camera data—no filenames allowed! Whether you're policing plagiarists or just spotting suspicious sameness, this tool wraps results in a tidy table (with a trusty footer) and delivers metadata magic with a wink. Academic honesty just got a stylish sidekick.

View on GitHub

Random Visualizer

Live Random Calculator is an interactive educational web application for computer science and game development. It compares 14 random number generation methods—from Pi digits and LCGs to PCG, Perlin noise, Sobol sequences, and cryptographic sources—using real-time visualizations, multi-base support (2–16), adjustable speeds, and built-in statistical analysis to help students understand randomness quality.

View on GitHub

InBetween

InBetween States is a structured dialogue tool designed for deep, one-on-one conversations with people you're close to. It helps establish psychological safety and relational clarity by guiding two participants through a complete conversation framework: first, they identify their emotional states (High, Meh, or Low) and define their roles or personas (Teacher, Parent, Friend, etc.)—the masks they're consciously wearing in this interaction—then they record their baseline perspective on a shared topic before beginning their dialogue. During the conversation, either person can capture insight shifts with optional favor scores (-10 to +10) indicating whether they're moving toward or away from understanding, creating a real-time visualization of relational alignment through converging or diverging curves. After the conversation, both participants reflect on how their perspectives have changed and whether their roles have shifted or inverted. The final report displays a complete picture: both people's baseline and new perspectives side-by-side, all motion moments with timestamps, the relational alignment chart, and role transformations—transforming an implicit, often confusing interaction into an explicit, measurable journey of mutual understanding.

View on GitHub

Synthesis Log

Synthesis Log is a multi-stage circular reflection tool designed to help you discover connections where none seemed to exist before. By rotating terms through two to five stages of deepening reflection—from historical context through concrete analysis to conceptual amalgamation and actionable motion—you build a perpetual spiral of insight that compounds over time. Each day introduces new terms while earlier ones mature through successive stages, creating an intricate web of associations that reveals the hidden architecture linking disparate concepts. This is more than a journaling app; it's a deliberate practice in spiraling out, in widening your aperture to see how music theory connects to motion verbs, how philosophy interweaves with biology, how your own thoughts form bridges across domains that conventional thinking keeps separate. The ultimate vision extends beyond personal reflection to a shared space where you can browse the spirals of others, witnessing how different minds weave their own paths through the same conceptual landscape, each journey unique yet resonant, each connection an invitation to see the world through new eyes.

Reports

KappStudy

The Vocabulary Quiz System is an interactive web application designed to empower students to master vocabulary terms and definitions across various subjects. Tailored for educational environments, it offers a dynamic, accessible interface for students to take quizzes and for teachers to manage vocabulary sets. Themed with school colors and packed with features like a quiz timer, dynamic titles, and detailed reports, this app enhances learning and engagement.

View on GitHub

LoveSync

LoveSync is a mobile-first, interactive web app that reimagines Gary Chapman's The 5 Love Languages® as a dynamic self-evaluation tool. Users rate their preferences for receiving and giving love across five categories—Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time, and Physical Touch—using intuitive 1-10 sliders for each mode.

View on GitHub

BlockTime

BlockTime is a minimalist web app designed to help users, particularly students, manage their weekly time allocation. Inspired by a Lego-based time management concept, it allows users to create custom categories, assign colors, and "drop" blocks into a 7-day grid (Monday to Sunday) to represent time spent on activities. Each block shows its category and time range (e.g., "Sleep: 8:00-8:30 PM"), with time labels (12AM, 6AM, 12PM, 6PM) integrated into the grid. Running totals for categories and the week are displayed below the grid. Users can copy days, save/apply day types (e.g., Work, Weekend), save/load schedules as JSON, and undo actions. The app supports time resolutions (15, 30, or 60 minutes) and generates a report with a summary, table, and pie chart, downloadable as a PDF. It’s optimized for desktop and mobile with a touch-friendly, simple design.

View on GitHub

FretFlow

A web application that visualizes MIDI files in real-time on both a guitar fretboard and piano roll. This project merges MIDI visualization functionality from FretFlow with the design aesthetic of musicTheory.

View on GitHub

Music Theory Modes

Music Theory Modes Web Application Overview This web application visualizes music theory modes on a guitar fretboard and piano roll. It allows users to explore different musical modes (Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, etc.) in various keys, with customizable notation (sharps or flats), guitar tuning, and string order. The app displays mode notes, intervals, chords, and emotional characteristics, with interactive controls for a dynamic learning experience. Features

View on GitHub

Payday Planner

Payday Planner is a simple web app that helps you manage your monthly bills by calculating the total amount needed in your checking account until your next payday (assumed to be the 1st or 15th of each month). Upload a CSV file with your bills, and the app will display the next payday, the total amount required for bills due before then, and a detailed list of those bills.

View on GitHub

SlideCraft

SlideCraft is a web-based application designed for high school students and educators to create interactive, presentation-style process guides from a CSV file. Users can upload a CSV containing process steps, select from predefined processes, view them in a full-screen, clickable interface (optimized for phones and projectors), choose between Light and Dark themes, and complete a random multiple-choice quiz. The app tracks the time taken and allows users to upload a photo of their process results, generating a PDF report suitable for submission to Canvas or other learning management systems.

View on GitHub

Untethered Day

Work in progress: The Consciousness Flow Tracker is a web-based application designed to help you map and visualize how your awareness and consciousness shift throughout the day based on your activities. Inspired by concepts from The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer, the app allows you to input daily activities, adjust their intensity (normal or excess), and see an animated pie chart representing the distribution of consciousness across systems like mind, body, heart, senses, and rest. The goal is to promote self-awareness and encourage a balanced lifestyle.

View on GitHub

GameScore Pro

GameScore Pro transforms any gathering into a seamless scoring experience. Whether you're playing cards with family, hosting a golf tournament, or running a board game night, GameScore Pro keeps everyone connected and engaged with real-time score tracking that works across all devices.

View on GitHub

LinkCipher

LinkCipher is a web-based app that helps users discover compatibility in relationships—whether romantic, professional, familial, or otherwise—through a unique, privacy-focused approach. By taking an adaptive survey, users generate a cryptic code that encapsulates their core values and life experiences. Share this code with another person to reveal links, disconnects, and caveats, presented in engaging visualizations like bar charts, Venn diagrams, or vertical lines. No data is stored, ensuring complete privacy.

View on GitHub

Mastery Signature

Work in progress - Mastery Signature is a dynamic web app designed to help you visualize and track your journey toward mastery in any discipline. By answering a series of questions about the time you’ve invested and the challenges you’ve faced across seven levels of mastery—from initial exposure to innovation—you’ll create a unique "mastery signature."

View on GitHub

CharacterCraft

CharacterCraft is a web-based tool inspired by The Writer's Digest Sourcebook for Building Believable Characters by Marc McCutcheon. It helps writers, educators, and storytellers create and manage detailed, believable characters through randomization, trait assignment, and bio generation. The app features a responsive interface with dark mode, exportable HTML reports, and an interactive Trait Bubbles screen with category filtering for dynamic character development.

View on GitHub

Adaptive Testing

This is a web-based adaptive assessment to help high school students determine their best fit for yearbook staff roles (Leadership, Photography, Design, Sidebar, Journalist, Page Finisher).

View on GitHub

RGB Color Visualizer

The 24Bit RGB Color Visualizer is an interactive web application designed to help users understand and experiment with 24-bit RGB color values. It provides a hands-on way to manipulate the individual bits of the Red, Green, and Blue color channels (8 bits each, totaling 24 bits) to create colors. The app displays the decimal and hexadecimal values for each channel, the combined RGB and hex values, and a visual preview of the resulting color.

View on GitHub

PageVis

PageVis is a web-based tool designed to help users create and visualize webpage layouts with customizable colors and content. It’s ideal for beginners learning HTML and CSS, offering a simple interface to design a page with sections (header, nav, content, footer, and accent), apply color schemes, edit content, and export as HTML and CSS. Exports use semantic HTML, include instructional comments, and provide sample content to guide new learners.

View on GitHub

PrintVis

Work in progress - PrintVis is a web-based tool designed to help yearbook students and educators visualize and create two-page yearbook spreads (17" x 11", two 8.5" x 11" pages side by side). It emphasizes a four-module "bullseye" design approach, where students can drag crosshairs to define the intersection of four quadrants and add content to each module using a toolbar. Each module can contain text, photo, and shape elements, with a title and a page number/label (e.g., “Page 1 - Senior Events”) anchoring the design. Built with a simple, intuitive interface, PrintVis bridges the design gap for beginners, making it ideal for high school yearbook classes.

View on GitHub

Aquilian Tracker

The Yearbook Staff Management App is a web-based tool designed to help Granite School District yearbook staff (up to 80 users) manage tasks and track time spent on projects, targeting approximately 57 hours per student per semester (with a 20% buffer, ~68 hours). Hosted at https://kappter.github.io/yearbook-staff-app/, it uses Google OAuth 2.0 for secure authentication restricted to @graniteschools.org domains and integrates with Google Sheets for task data storage.

View on GitHub

Benford's Law Analyzer

This web application allows users to analyze text files (.txt) or images (.png, .jpg) containing numbers to check if the distribution of first digits (1-9) follows Benford's Law. It provides a live tally of first digits in a bar chart, a progress bar, and a final analysis to detect potential anomalies, which could indicate data manipulation or fraud.

View on GitHub

Perfect10

After a comedian quipped he'd never met a '10' and only encountered three '9s' in his life, I was left pondering: What even is a 10? A year of single-life soul-searching later, I built the Perfect 10 Evaluator—a tongue-in-cheek, code-driven quest to quantify the unquantifiable. Whether you're sizing up a roommate, significant other, or even your mom, this tool playfully crunches the numbers on compatibility, charm, and that elusive '10' factor. Spoiler: It’s less about finding perfection and more about laughing at the absurdity of trying.

View on GitHub

Numbers

Dive into the numerical cosmos with "1001 Integers: Divisors & More," a sleek, canvas-powered web app that transforms integers from 0 to 1001 into a playground of mathematical wizardry! This interactive gem lets you surf the number line with click-and-drag ease, uncovering divisors, prime factors, and base conversions while spotlighting Fibonacci, Catalan, and Bell numbers with vibrant visual flair—perfect for math enthusiasts and curious coders alike!

View on GitHub

PairPal

PairPal is an interactive web app that explores personality pairings, offering insights into compatibility, potential challenges, and actionable advice. With a sleek interface and a new mode selector, users can switch between different datasets and personality acronyms to explore diverse pairing dynamics.

View on GitHub

WordMaker

This web application generates fictional words based on selected word structures (like Prefix-Root-Suffix) and themes. It combines real prefixes, roots, and suffixes to create new, plausible-sounding words along with their potential definitions.

View on GitHub

FileEz

A web-based tool for analyzing file structures, designed for educational purposes. Upload files to visualize their binary content, metadata, and sections, with features to explore file name and extension storage, hex data, and encryption.

View on GitHub

Lesson Visualizer

This project is a web-based application designed to display lesson plans for Computer Programming 1 and Computer Programming 2, aligned with Utah’s curriculum standards. The application features a single-page interface with a dropdown menu to select a course (Programming 1 or Programming 2) and a paginated table displaying lesson details, including Day, Strand/Standard, Title, Concepts, and Starter activity. The interface is styled with Tailwind CSS for a clean, responsive design and uses Papa Parse to parse CSV files containing the lesson plans.

View on GitHub

MealPlan

This is a simple web-based application that helps you randomize full meal ideas, including an appetizer, an entree, and a side dish. You can also filter entree suggestions based on specific ingredients you have on hand. It features a modern, responsive design with a light/dark mode toggle.

View on GitHub

Amalgamator

Very much a work in progress with HUGELY ambitious goals. Lemme know if you are a database person, hehe. A utility for combining and processing various data types.

View on GitHub

CollabSync

CollabSync is a platform for musicians and vocalists to collaborate remotely by responding to a base track with their own recordings. Each session is guided by musical constraints like key, mode, mood, and tempo, and allows real-time creative interaction.

View on GitHub

ToneTally

Interactive guitar-piano visualizer with mode analysis and note frequency tally for music like Toccata and Fugue.

View on GitHub

Art

Art, for me, has never belonged to a single medium. It exists somewhere between observation and interpretation—a way of exploring emotion, memory, symbolism, texture, rhythm, and atmosphere without needing everything to be fully explained. Whether through visual design, music, photography, writing, interface design, or experimental digital work, I create less to declare meaning and more to discover it.

One of my early art teachers, Mr. Collins, often repeated the phrase “repetition with constant variation,” and that idea has quietly stayed with me ever since. Much of my creative process still revolves around returning to the same themes from slightly different angles: structure and chaos, technology and humanity, motion and stillness, nostalgia and reinvention. I am drawn to systems, patterns, and visual relationships, but I am equally interested in the imperfections that make something feel alive.

Art has become less about producing finished pieces and more about cultivating attention. A texture on a wall, the shape of old typography, the color relationships in a weathered photograph, the emotional weight of a musical interval, the pacing of silence between ideas—these small details often become the beginning of larger explorations. In many ways, the work shown here represents fragments of an ongoing conversation with curiosity itself: an attempt to slow down long enough to notice something meaningful before it disappears.

Photography

Photography is one of the ways I practice attention. A camera gives me permission to slow down, look again, and notice what might otherwise pass by unnoticed: the angle of light across a wall, the texture of an old surface, the quiet geometry of a street, or the way a landscape holds memory without saying anything at all.

I am drawn to images that feel discovered rather than staged. Whether I am walking through an urban space, traveling through open terrain, or simply noticing something ordinary at the right moment, photography helps me preserve small encounters with form, shadow, color, and atmosphere. Each image becomes a record of looking closely.

In that sense, photography connects naturally to the rest of my creative work. It is part documentation, part reflection, and part visual study. The photographs here are not just souvenirs of places I have been; they are evidence of curiosity, pauses in motion, and attempts to hold fleeting moments long enough to understand why they mattered.

Music

Music has always been less of a performance for me and more of a conversation—an attempt to explore emotion, memory, tension, motion, and atmosphere in ways that language often cannot fully capture. I am drawn to sound not because it provides escape, but because it reveals things. A riff, a chord progression, a rhythmic shift, or even a single sustained note can sometimes communicate more honestly than explanation ever could.

Much of my musical thinking revolves around exploration and experimentation. I spend a great deal of time improvising, studying modes, layering textures, building rhythmic ideas, and following unexpected musical paths simply to see where they lead. Guitar remains my primary companion in that process, though increasingly I find myself interested in systems that connect music, visualization, interaction, and technology together. Many of the applications and experiments elsewhere in this portfolio grew directly out of those musical curiosities.

The recordings here are intentionally raw. Most are first-take sketches, fragments, improvisations, or captured moments rather than polished studio productions. I value preserving the original energy of an idea before refinement smooths away its personality. If you would like to hear more recent work, evolving projects, and current musical experiments, you can also browse my SoundCloud archive here, where I regularly upload new material, sketches, and ongoing explorations.

Hobbies

I have always struggled to think of hobbies as mere distractions. Most of the things I return to repeatedly—motorcycles, dictionaries, astronomy, music gear, wandering bookstores, photography, strange software experiments—feel less like entertainment and more like ways of exploring attention, curiosity, and perspective.

Motorcycles, for instance, offer a kind of clarity that is difficult to find elsewhere. Riding demands complete presence. The machine, the road, the weather, the rhythm of movement, the constant negotiation between control and uncertainty—everything narrows into a single uninterrupted moment. At highway speed, distraction disappears. There is only awareness, motion, and the strange calm that comes from total focus.

Dictionaries occupy the opposite end of that spectrum, yet somehow satisfy the same instinct. I can lose hours exploring old words, obscure definitions, etymologies, and forgotten phrases. Language feels alive to me—part historical artifact, part evolving map of human thought. Browsing a dictionary often feels less like studying vocabulary and more like wandering through a museum of consciousness.

Astronomy provides another kind of recalibration. Looking upward has a way of shrinking ego while simultaneously expanding wonder. It reminds me that human beings are both incredibly small and astonishingly capable of meaning-making. That tension has always fascinated me.

Across all of these interests runs a common thread: curiosity. I am drawn to systems, patterns, motion, tools, stories, and experiences that reveal hidden structure beneath ordinary life. Whether I am riding through the desert, studying an old typeface, experimenting with sound, or opening a strange book I found tucked into a dusty shelf somewhere, I am usually chasing the same thing—a deeper sense of connection and understanding.

Interests

Over the last several years, many of my interests have begun converging around a common set of questions: How do people learn? How do systems evolve? Why do certain patterns repeat across music, technology, relationships, creativity, and personal growth? Increasingly, I find myself drawn not just to individual disciplines, but to the spaces where disciplines overlap and begin influencing one another.

I remain deeply interested in computer science, interface design, music theory, creative technology, psychology, systems thinking, education, philosophy, and the ways emerging technologies reshape human behavior and communication. Much of my recent work has focused on building tools that encourage reflection, creativity, collaboration, and deeper interaction—especially through music, visualization, adaptive systems, and educational design.

I have also become increasingly fascinated by process itself: how ideas form, how motivation rises and collapses, how identity changes over time, and how people attempt to make meaning from chaotic experiences. Journaling systems, conceptual mapping, improvisation, pattern recognition, and iterative creative work have all become important parts of that exploration. Many of the projects throughout this portfolio are direct extensions of those interests.

More than anything, I am interested in curiosity that remains active. I admire people who continue experimenting, building, questioning, revising, and learning long after external expectations would suggest they stop. Whether through teaching, music, software, design, writing, or conversation, I continue trying to better understand the relationship between creativity, structure, emotion, and human connection.

Awards

Recognition has never been the goal of my work, but it has occasionally served as a meaningful reminder that the effort mattered beyond the classroom itself. Most teaching victories happen quietly: a student discovering confidence, a project finally clicking into place, a difficult year ending with growth instead of surrender. Awards simply offer visible markers along a much larger journey of teaching, mentorship, creativity, and continued experimentation.

These honors reflect not only classroom instruction, but also years spent building programs, advising students, exploring creative technology, supporting leadership organizations, and encouraging students to create work that extends beyond school walls into authentic personal and professional growth.

Upcoming Projects

Upcoming projects are where unfinished ideas begin taking shape. Some are books, some are tools, some are systems, and some are still only fragments of language, design, or code waiting for the right structure. I think of this section as a preview of what is currently forming beneath the surface.

These works-in-progress reflect the same themes that move through much of my teaching and creative work: mastery, reflection, technology, meaning-making, and the search for better ways to help people understand themselves and the systems around them.

Paramour | Permission to Master

A reflective book project exploring ambition, mastery, identity, and the difficult question of what it means to devote yourself deeply to something. It is for the high-achiever, the late bloomer, the restless learner, and anyone wondering whether credentials alone can ever fully explain a life’s work.

Coming Soon

Words in the Wild

A collection of essays and reflections about language, technology, nature, creativity, and attention. This project explores how words shape perception, how tools shape behavior, and how meaning often appears when ordinary experience is observed closely enough.

Coming Soon

Teaching the Future

A practical and philosophical guide for educators working with coding, media, robotics, creative technology, and student portfolios. The project focuses on helping students build visible evidence of growth while teachers design classrooms where experimentation and reflection can thrive.

Coming Soon