Scott Laidlaw is a math teacher-turned-game designer. With 14 years of in-classroom teaching experience at the elementary, secondary and university levels since earning his doctoral degree from the University of Northern Colorado, Scott has focused on research into how students learn mathematics through the imagination and development of tools to enhance such learning. Scott began teaching math at a middle school where fewer than 28% of his students were proficient in math. Inspired by Sky Mall's World's Largest Write-on Map, Scott developed a math game based on the spice trade in the 1600s. Encouraged by his students' popular refrain, "do we get to play the game today?" he developed seven story-based, in-classroom math games with historical fiction themes that became the focal point of his classroom curriculum, and which also led to a remarkable 80% gain in proficiency over four years. One of the most popular games, Ko, as it was originally called, was written over the summer in an amazing region of the Andes amidst 20,000 feet peaks and played with stone totems on hand-painted deer hides. Five years later in 2010, with students still recalling how they had learned the Cartesian Coordinate system from Luna of the Night Sky, Scott released Ko's Journey to software, winning a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant to disseminate nation-wide. Since the original release of Ko's Journey, Scott has led the design and development of The MSM Digital Toolset, incorporating Ko's Journey, Empires, the first socially-networked, story-based pre-algebra game, Test Trainer Pro, the MSM Clicker System and the MSM Story Project Library. Most recently, his MidSchoolMath team secured a Small Business Innovation and Research Grant from the National Science Foundation to support the development of an innovative Math Simulator.