Ravi Puralena has a lifelong fascination with how technology can bring joy to learners. Although his initial attempts at learning a foreign language in a high school classroom were awful, when he got to university, he was able to reprogram the video games and movies he enjoyed to teach himself German successfully. This attracted the attention of the Alexander von Humbolt Foundation and the German Government, who awarded him a long-term fellowship to continue exploring how video game technology and techniques could improve the language learning process. He also had many further opportunities to explore this topic, working as a Research Manager in the MIT Education Arcade / Learning Games Network research lab and elsewhere.