Finley Neilson

GeoScratch is a block-based environment for learning 3D geometry and linear algebra, and the subject of my honours research. The idea behind it is simple: humans already have an enormous head start when it comes to three dimensional space. We've been navigating it, judging depth, and tracking objects moving through it since before we could talk. That's intuition your visual system builds for free, and it's a much better foundation to teach from than intuitions about, say, prime numbers, which are hard-won and mostly reserved for professional mathematicians. My research asks what happens if we design 3D geometry teaching tools around that existing visual intuition, instead of asking students to painfully rebuild it from formulas and static diagrams alone.

Shape Transform is a 3D puzzle game where you rotate a cluster of blocks, one step at a time, to match a target shape before the clock runs out. I built it with my group, Blockarang, as an alternative to the Vandenberg Mental Rotations Test, the standard way spatial reasoning gets measured. It's psychometrically solid but genuinely boring, so the goal was to keep the same cognitive workout while making it something people would actually want to play.

Terrain++ is a real-time procedural terrain generator written in C++ with OpenGL, built as part of a graphics course group project. The goal was to generate believable mountainous landscapes entirely from noise, with fast enough iteration that you could tune the look live instead of waiting on offline bakes.