Innovative Teaching: Justín Reyna

It’s being heavily used by his students, who are mostly junior and senior undergraduates.

Reyna’s online game—that he coded himself—is also popular with students. A team of student volunteers who previously took Reyna’s class helped develop trivia-style questions based on course content for the game.

“I’m a big game guy and I wanted to do something that no one has ever done,” Reyna says.

The game includes several modes, including chapter review and practice quizzes. It also includes links to the chatbot, articles, class whiteboards, videos and in-class questions. The latest addition has students write an essay that is graded by AI and assigned points within the game, Reyna says.

Participants get points for answering questions correctly, which are tallied on an anonymous leaderboard that Reyna shares at the start of each class. Players can use points to buy weapons to attack other classmates or to spin a “chaos wheel.”

“It’s not a grade. It’s like Candyland-type rules,” he laughs. “But I do give prizes to the leaders throughout the semester.”

When he introduced a beta version of the game last spring, it was a gamechanger for his class.

“The chatbot was good, but the game was light years beyond — it was everything for the students,” he says.

Now in its third semester in use, the game is more popular than ever.

Richard Wu, Class of ’26, isn’t usually the type of student that goes out of his way for extra practice of course material. But he couldn’t resist the fun, friendly competition of the game when he took Reyna’s class in spring 2025.

“The idea was so novel, I just had to try it out,” said Wu, who held the top spot in the game until an unlucky wheel-of-chaos spin. “Professor Reyna is just really inspiring. He coded it himself, and he could tweak things and mold the game to his lectures. I just found that super interesting and I loved participating. He made it really fun.”

That enthusiasm for Reyna and his teaching style helped him win Smith’s highest teaching award from students, and it helped him recruit help to develop the game in the first place.

Julie Cha ’25 took Reyna’s law class in fall 2024 and really enjoyed it. “I really liked the way that he helped a lot of concepts stick, with quizzes and a lot of active recall.”

When he asked for help developing a game for the course at the end of the semester, Cha and about a dozen other students signed up. They met regularly to come up with questions for the game and test a beta version.

Cha says the game helps students really take control of their learning and helps them stay engaged.

“It generates a lot more student interest in the class and it’s not what the other professors are doing — it’s a bit different.”

Cha says Reyna was the reason she got involved. “He really just wants students to learn, and not just to give a grade and give exams,” she says. “The way that he prepares for classes and gets students a lot more engaged shows that.”

Outside of class, Reyna meets regularly with a group of students he calls the OCI team for “originality, creativity and innovation.” He’s getting them to tap into their creative sides, to develop more games, videos and other content to study business. The group is currently making multiple mini games to help learn the most difficult content for the hardest business classes. He’s teaching them to vibe code, using AI to create some of the games, which allows even students who have never coded to develop real applications.

Reyna says he spends so much time coming with innovative ways to help students learn because he wants to give them an edge — in the classroom, when competing in case competitions, in job interviews, and ultimately as business leaders.

“People who look at things creatively will do business better than people who just lock themselves into the business mentality.”