I am twenty years old, and I have spent the last eight years of my life in college classrooms.
That sentence still surprises people, and honestly, it sometimes surprises me too. I am a third-year Ph.D. candidate in Learning Technologies at the University of North Texas, studying how generative artificial intelligence is reshaping the way we design educational media. I came to this work because I have lived inside the systems I now research. I was a kid learning in classrooms that were not built for someone like me, and later, a young entrepreneur trying to build creative tools that actually fit how my generation thinks. The questions I ask as a scholar are the same ones I have been wrestling with since I was thirteen.
Professional Overview
Ian Taylor Schlitz
Academic Journey
Home School Hybrid?
My academic story really begins with how I learned, not just what I accomplished. I started out in traditional public school, but by around first grade it was clear the pace and structure were not the right fit for how my mind worked. My family pulled me out and transitioned me to homeschooling, which gave me the space to move at my own speed and dig deeply into the subjects that captured my attention. After a stretch of full-time homeschooling, I shifted into a hybrid model through a private school that met on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That arrangement gave me the best of both worlds: the flexibility and depth of homeschooling on the days I was at home, and the structure, accountability, and community of a classroom on the days I was on campus. That foundation is what made everything that followed possible.
Acceleration!
I graduated high school at twelve. I enrolled at Tarrant County College not long after and walked across the stage with my Associate of Arts at fourteen, with high honors. From there I transferred to the University of North Texas, where I earned my Bachelor of Science in Learning Technologies in May 2021, graduating Magna Cum Laude through the Honors College at sixteen. That fall I was admitted to the MBA program at Tarleton State University, and in May 2023 I finished it at seventeen, becoming one of the youngest African American MBA graduates. Each program taught me something I am still using. Undergrad gave me the language of learning design. The MBA taught me how to run a team, read a balance sheet, and think about education as a system with real economic stakes. Now, in my doctorate at UNT, I get to bring all of it together. Expected graduation year: 2027
What about your childhood?
The other question I get a lot is about socialization. The assumption behind it is usually that an accelerated, nontraditional path must have meant a lonely or narrow childhood. My experience was the opposite. Because I was not tied to a traditional school schedule five days a week, I had room to build a life around the people, communities, and interests that mattered to me. I swam competitively and played water polo. I fenced. I went to math camp, orchestra camp, and an Unreal Engine camp where I learned the early skills that would later inform my creative work. I was active in Jack and Jill of America and in Alpha Academy under Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated, both of which connected me to mentors and friendships that shaped how I think about leadership and service. I traveled to esports events and built friendships through gaming that I still have today. The version of socialization I grew up with was not a single classroom of thirty kids my age. It was a much wider circle of teammates, campers, mentors, and collaborators, and I think it gave me a richer sense of how to move through different kinds of communities than a traditional schedule would have. I'd attach all the photos but this page would become far too long.
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Research Focus
What pulls me toward research is a fairly stubborn curiosity about workflows. How does an AI tool actually change the way a designer makes a lesson? What happens to creativity when iteration becomes nearly free? Who gets left out when production speeds up? These are the questions I follow.
Right now I am a research contributor on an NIH-funded STEM education grant studying AI-based educational media, where I focus on developing a AI-powered rapid prototyping system for educational media. AI outputs are only useful if they are consistent and traceable, and I have learned a lot about how to keep them that way. The idea behind this research is to provide under-resourced schools who otherwise wouldn't have access to tailored educational media, a means to develop their own material.
I have also been fortunate to present at two reputable conferences in my field. At the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE) International Conference in Orlando (2025), I presented peer-reviewed research on generative AI for educational media design and joined a panel on how we measure perceptions of AI in education. At the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) International Conference in Las Vegas (2025), I contributed to a mixed-methods study with 150 faculty participants on how higher education instructors are adopting generative AI in their teaching and assessment practices.
My scholarly writing reflects these threads. I have co-authored work currently under review at the International Journal of Designs for Learning and the Journal of Further and Higher Education, alongside a published proceedings paper on assessing perceptions of AI in education. The themes are consistent: design holistically, measure honestly, and pay attention to the people on the other end of the technology.
Entrepreneurial Background
I have always built things alongside studying them, and I think that is part of why my research feels alive to me.
In 2018, at thirteen, I founded Kidlamity Gaming. My mother tasked me with identifying a problem in the world, and develop a means to fix it. So... me being an avid gamer, I looked to the Esports scene of all places (not quite what my mom had in mind, but she indulged.) The idea was simple. I was a competitive gamer, and the local Super Smash Bros. tournaments were full of adults. There was no real space for kids my age to play seriously, so I made one. Kidlamity ran tournaments for children ages seven to seventeen exclusively across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex until the pandemic shut down in-person events.
That disruption pushed me to pivot. In November 2020, I launched BeinBian Studios, a boutique animation studio specializing in custom block animation. My time as a animator can be traced back to 2017 on my YouTube channel named "BeinBian", where I uploaded my first Minecraft animation titled "guy and dragon" made in the software Mine-Imator. That animation was awful, but I was passionate about the art and wanted to learn as much as I can. The name BeinBian is something my mother thought of, combing the word "baby" and "Ian" (since I started my channel at 8 years old, and was managed by my parents). I made many action / fight animations over the years, and joined online communities (yes I was on Discord before turning 13) where I eventually met some of my closest friends, who I still actively talk to today. As for the previously mentioned studio, I run it as Founder and Creative Director, leading a global team of animators and editors who produce short-form content for online creators with audiences in the hundreds of thousands. Our work has contributed to projects with more than 1.5 million views, all of which were positively received.
Road to Collegiate Esports
I currently compete as a collegiate VALORANT player for the University of North Texas, on Team Green, our highest-tier club team. Collegiate esports asks for the same things any serious sport asks for: practice schedules, team strategy, film review, and the willingness to lose publicly and learn from it. I love it for the competition, but I also keep showing up because it sharpens the way I think about my research. Gaming is the reason Kidlamity existed. It is part of why I care about gamification and engagement now. I am not studying these communities from the outside.
I started competing in Esports through Super Smash Brothers 4 when I was younger. I had competed for years, and was actually pretty good at the game. In my local community, I was referred to as the "child prodigy," and in another world I probably am a professional Super Smash Brothers player. I eventually grew bored of Super Smash Bros, and went into the first-person shooter (FPS) genre when I migrated from console gaming to PC gaming. VALORANT was released in 2020, and initially I wasn't interested in playing. It didn't seem that fun to me, as I primarily enjoyed Minecraft and other platformer games, such as Brawlhalla. Two of my closest friends kept essentially begging me to play VALORANT with them, to which I eventually caved. My first few games in, I fell in love with the game, and kept playing with my friends and even on my own.
Come 2023, I am admitted to the Learning Technologies PhD program at UNT, and I hear that they have a collegiate VALORANT team. I joined the Discord server, sent in my applications, and was scheduled to try out! I went in with the most confidence and got absolutely destroyed. By some miracle, I made it onto the club's weakest team, team black. We competed and got destroyed, as expected. Come the next year (2024), I apply again, perform much better, and get placed on the club's middle team, team white. I had a blast with this team, and while we didn't win many tournament matches, the experience of competing in person was amazing. Skip ahead a little more, and now it's 2025. Tryouts have reopened, and once again, I apply in hopes of finally making it to the top team. Fortunately for me, I played well in tryouts, and the top team was already familiar with me as I played well against them on team white in tournament matches and in-house events. My team and I went on to win an entire tournament without dropping a single match, and it was by far the most satisfying moment of my Esports career.
Scholar, Mentor, and Public Voice
A lot of the work I am proudest of happens outside academic publications.
My story has been covered by NBC DFW, WFAA, UPI, The North Texan, The Black Wall Street Times, Face2Face Africa, Voyage Dallas, Bold Journey, Canvas Rebel, and the Blacks in Technology podcast, among others. I am also a Davidson Young Scholar and a member of American Mensa, the Mensa Honor Society, and the National Black MBA Association.
But the part of my public work that I think matters most is the teaching I do online. I host a YouTube channel with more than 20,000 subscribers where I make instructional content on 3D animation, digital lighting, and creative production. My videos have collectively earned over 2 million views, and the comments and messages I get back have shaped how I think about accessible technical instruction. I have also designed and taught an international online course on digital lighting through Discord, where I built the curriculum, delivered live lessons, gave individualized feedback, and assigned grades to students across multiple time zones. That course was, in a real sense, my first time running a classroom of my own. It taught me as much as it taught my students.
What ties all of this together, the research, the studio, the channel, the team, the interviews, is a single commitment. I want young people, especially those from communities historically underrepresented in technology and graduate education, to know that the door is open. I walked through it earlier than most, and I would like to hold it open behind me.
As I finish my doctorate, the question that keeps me working is simple: how do we design learning technologies so the people they are meant to serve are genuinely engaged, not just included on paper?
