About Us

Project Leads

Nathan Holbert, Ph.D., PI, Assistant Professor of Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Daisy Rutstein, Ph.D., PI, is an educational researcher in the SRI assessment group.

Betsy DiSalvo, Ph.D., co-PI, Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Matthew Berland, Ph.D., co-PI, Associate Professor of Design, Informal, and Creative Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at UW–Madison.

Jeremy Roschelle, Ph.D., co-PI, is the Executive Director at Digital Promise.

Other staff and students working on this project include:

Teachers College, Columbia University

Marleen Villeroy, Stephanie Yang, Sawaros Thanapornsangsuth

Georgia Institute of Technology

Rui ZhouAkansha Gupta, Junjie (JJ) Xu

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Anthony Pellicone, Vishesh Kumar

SRI International

Satabdi Basu, Reina Fuji, Yuning Xu (now at Kidaptive), Meara Algama

Filament Games

Will Jackson – Producer

Luke Jayapalan – Game Designer

Megan Tran – Lead Visual and Interaction Designer 

Joe Horan – Visual and Interaction Designer

Dave Hoffman – Additional Visual Design

Brandon Korth – Additional Interaction Design

Rob Frank – Lead Game Engineer

Jared Levine – Game Engineer

Chris Johnson – Game Engineer

Logan Branjord – Additional Engineering

Lynden Fenske – 3-D Artist

Chenya Chang – 2-D Artist

Josh Bartels – Composer and Sound Engineer

Georgia Adkins – Quality Assurance

Brian Czech – Quality Assurance 

Nell Farrell – Quality Assurance 

Neale LaPlante Johnson – Quality Assurance 

Dan Norton – Account Manager


Beats Empire is licensed as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. That means anyone is free to share or adapt the game as long as you give proper attribution, don’t use the game for commercial purposes, and distribute your version of the game using the same license.