Matthew Gisi
Creative Technologist & Educator
I recently completed a B.S. in Creative Technologies at Illinois State University and am now pursuing a Master's in Creative Technologies there. After four years of broadcasting, video production, esports operations, and software programming, my next venture is starting a company — in between 13 national championships.
About
I just completed my B.S. in Creative Technologies at Illinois State University and am continuing on there into a Master's in Creative Technologies. After four years that went in directions I didn't fully plan for, I'm greatful for the opportunity to expand my skills and experience even further.
ISU gave me a lot to work with. I came in on an esports scholarship and spent the better part of two years running the Redbird Esports media program: live broadcasts, real-time graphics, social content, team logistics, a growing broadcast operation I largely built from the ground up. We won 13 national championships in Overwatch during that stretch, and I was in the room for all of them. The 2026 MVC Esports Championship is where that work is heading.
At the same time, I kept finding myself teaching. Environmental field science lectures at a residential summer camp, robotics coaching, esports coaching that ended in a 2024 state championship. Every time I got to be the person who understood how something worked and could help someone else understand it too — that's the part that kept sticking.
This spring I'm presenting research at the ISU Research Symposium. My question: how do student research practices in environmental field science evolve with time and experience? I'm working through 20 years of student documents from a high school field science program (2005 to 2025), looking at how document structure, methodological rigor, and writing complexity shift as students develop. It connects directly to the field science work I've been doing and the kind of teaching I'm building toward.
The creative side runs through all of it: motion graphics, broadcast production, UI/UX, real-time rendering. My degree is in Creative Technologies because the work I actually do doesn't fit neatly into "developer" or "designer." Usually it's somewhere in between, in service of something specific.
The PEDAL project (Portable Environmental Data Analyzer & Logger) received a Williams Student Success Award grant in 2025. It's a hardware prototype that sits at the same intersection as my research: electronics, programming, and environmental science, designed to be a teaching tool as much as a data collection one.
Experience
Edgewood High School of the Sacred Heart
Edgewood High School of the Sacred Heart
Edgewood High School, Environmental Field Ed.
Illinois State University
Nakoma Golf Club
Work
Organized and produced the full 2026 Missouri Valley Conference Esports Championship LAN: live Overwatch stats pipeline, 1×6 digital signage, X32 audio routing, vMix, and Companion. The culmination of four years building ISU's broadcast infrastructure.
Full breakdown →Full-stack web platform built for Edgewood High School's St. Croix Environmental Field Science program. Centralizes student applications, document collection, and submission workflows into a modern, unified system, replacing manual and fragmented processes.
Live site →Private, self-hosted coaching platform for a competitive Overwatch team. VOD library with HLS adaptive streaming and per-player locked access, async playbook with review tracking and comment threads, interactive slide-deck lessons, a real-time collaborative whiteboard with hero tokens / timeline keyframes / MP4+GIF export, a competitive draft helper that enforces ban rules, and a full admin panel, all behind Google SSO with role-based access.
View project →Self-hosted Linux server running personal projects, family services, dev tools, and custom-built applications, all routed through a single Caddy reverse proxy and exposed via Cloudflare Tunnel with no open inbound ports.
View dashboard →Official website for the Overwatch World Cup Team Pakistan organization. Roster, schedule, news, VODs, merch, and a fan community forum, all managed through a private admin dashboard. Bilingual in English and Urdu with RTL support. Self-hosted on a homelab via Docker, Caddy, and Cloudflare Tunnel.
View project →Self-hosted bookmark and workspace manager. Web app for organizing links into named workspaces, paired with a Chrome MV3 extension that opens and syncs workspaces as native tab groups. Express + SQLite + OIDC behind Caddy.
Personal operations dashboard at dispatch.matthewgisi.com. Recurring task templates, dashboards, and a CodeMirror-backed notes surface, gated to a Google OAuth allowlist. Astro 5 SSR + React + Drizzle on Postgres.
Self-hosted timeclock at timeclock.matthewgisi.com for tracking hours at Edgewood. Google OAuth-gated web app with a clock in/out API designed for iOS Shortcuts, scheduled report jobs, and signed PDF timesheet exports.
Shared task list for me and my brother Ben, with per-assignee views, pinned priorities, and a cron-driven daily digest. Lightweight Express + SQLite backend with a React client, OIDC-gated.
Interactive indoor floor-plan viewer for Edgewood High School, covering sub-basement through third floor. Pan/zoom navigation, room metadata, and OIDC-gated access for staff and students. Postgres-backed backend with a React frontend.
Replaced Edgewood's paper-based purchase order workflow with a fully digital process, reducing approval time and eliminating lost documents.
Explore system →A publicly accessible web application designed to improve ed-tech literacy among parents and guardians of middle and high school students, bridging the gap between families and the tools shaping their children's education. Community-informed content drawn from direct engagement with parent communities. In development · Spring 2026 capstone.
Live site →Individual research project examining how student research practices evolve over 20 years within a long-running high school environmental field science program. Applies computational document analysis to a digitized archive to identify patterns in writing complexity, document structure, methodological signaling, and reflection, measuring aspects of learning that are typically assumed rather than formally tracked. Presented as an ePoster at the Illinois State University Research Symposium, April 10, 2026.
Modular environmental sensing platform built around an ESP32 core logger with interchangeable atmospheric, soil, and water quality sensor modules, designed for rugged, compact field deployment. Williams Student Success Award grantee (2025). Field-proven at St. Croix State Park: used to verify anomalous pH readings in drinking water, diagnose failing professional sensors, and identify a diesel generator fault that would have forced abandonment of a remote research expedition.
Custom HTML/CSS/JS overlay that ingests live Rocket League game data and drives real-time graphic state changes across the ISU Twitch broadcast, combined with game feed and GT Title graphics in vMix.
Event photography, team portraits, and social media graphics produced for the ISU Esports program and used across institutional and social channels.
Custom promotional mechanical keyboard concept designed for Illinois State University's Birds Give Back campaign. Combined branding, fabrication, packaging, and a custom LCD animation into a polished prototype, built in 3 days. Explored as a scalable promotional item for campus partners.
Competed as a varsity player for ISU Esports and won 13 national collegiate Overwatch championships. 2022 WIHSEA All-State MVP as a player. Career record (Goose#16238): 414 matches (331W / 83L, +248), 1,276 maps (975W / 301L, +674). Full competitive record on Liquipedia.
Liquipedia record →Starting a computer science and interdisciplinary technologies teaching position at Edgewood in summer 2026, expanding a program I've been building toward for four years.
Taught environmental science field lectures, managed data collection technology, and handled AV/network infrastructure at a residential field camp. Summers 2023–present.
A two-part broadcast and analytics infrastructure platform designed to replace fragmented production workflows for esports and scholastic sports programs. BroadcastManager2 is a hybrid cloud/local platform for live overlays, hardware control (ATEM, PTZ), and multi-user broadcast operations built around a portable "Compendium" asset system. InMotion is the companion video capture and analytics platform, recording, tagging, and reviewing gameplay footage with a foundation for future computer vision and performance tracking. Together they form a unified system enabling schools and small teams to operate at a professional level without enterprise infrastructure.
Producing live broadcasts for the National Esports Collegiate Conference (NECC), bringing the same production infrastructure and workflow built at ISU to a national collegiate stage. Production experience across Overwatch, Rocket League, League of Legends, Super Smash Bros., Valorant, and Marvel Rivals, with R6 and CS2 on deck.
Esports
Organized and produced the full 2026 Missouri Valley Conference Esports Championship LAN: live Overwatch stats pipeline, 1×6 digital signage, X32 audio routing, vMix, and Companion. The culmination of four years building ISU's broadcast infrastructure.
Built Projects
Full-stack web platform built for Edgewood High School's St. Croix Environmental Field Science program. Centralizes student applications, document collection, and submission workflows into a modern, unified system, replacing manual and fragmented processes.
No gallery items yet.
Built Projects
Modular environmental sensing platform built around an ESP32 core logger with interchangeable atmospheric, soil, and water quality sensor modules, designed for rugged, compact field deployment. Williams Student Success Award grantee (2025). Field-proven at St. Croix State Park: used to verify anomalous pH readings in drinking water, diagnose failing professional sensors, and identify a diesel generator fault that would have forced abandonment of a remote research expedition.
No gallery items yet.
Creative & Production
Event photography, team portraits, and social media graphics produced for the ISU Esports program and used across institutional and social channels.
Creative & Production
Custom promotional mechanical keyboard concept designed for Illinois State University's Birds Give Back campaign. Combined branding, fabrication, packaging, and a custom LCD animation into a polished prototype, built in 3 days. Explored as a scalable promotional item for campus partners.
Built Projects
Code
Most-recently-pushed public repos and the language mix across all of them. Cached server-side; refreshes hourly. github.com/mtgisi ↗
Writing
What coaching a high school esports team actually taught me — and why the game was never really the point.
A framework for designing classrooms that balance shared foundations with individualized exploration, particularly in expansive fields like computer science.
How I built a live game data overlay for ISU Esports broadcasts — combining a Vite dev server, custom JS state machine, and vMix compositing to create something that looks like it cost money.
Contact
Occasional writing on education, technology, and whatever I'm building next. Click "Subscribe" to receive a confirmation link to opt-in.
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