Pokémon to Prodigy: How Game-Based Learning Captivated 20 Million Students with Rohan Mahimker

Rohan Mahimker is Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Prodigy Education, a global leader in digital game-based learning.

Rohan launched Prodigy alongside his fellow Co-Founder and Co-CEO Alex Peters in 2011. Today, Prodigy’s flagship math game is used by more than 20 million 1st-8th Grade students and is one of the most popular supplemental classroom tools in the United States.

💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:

1. How a university project evolved into one of the world’s most popular math games
2. The secret behind Prodigy’s “motivation first” approach to learning
3. Why Prodigy’s freemium model reshaped EdTech’s business playbook
4. How the Prodigy State Challenge became the world’s largest math competition
5. Where AI and personalization fit into the future of game-based learning

✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:02:24] Rohan on turning childhood gaming inspiration into Prodigy’s origin story
[00:07:29] How “motivation first” drives deeper math engagement
[00:13:09] The adaptive algorithm that personalizes every student’s learning path
[00:17:27] Innovating the freemium model to keep learning free for teachers and schools
[00:27:53] Inside the Prodigy State Challenge: 4.2M students and 70,000 schools
[00:31:04] Using AI for smarter content creation and future tutoring potential
[00:43:30] What’s next: expanding beyond math to English and global game-based learning

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Chapters

• 2:40 Rohan on turning childhood gaming inspiration into Prodigy’s origin story
• 7:45 How “motivation first” drives deeper math engagement
• 14:21 The adaptive algorithm that personalizes every student’s learning path
• 18:39 Innovating the freemium model to keep learning free for teachers and schools
• 29:05 Inside the Prodigy State Challenge: 4.2M students and 70,000 schools
• 32:16 Using AI for smarter content creation and future tutoring potential
• 44:42 What’s next: expanding beyond math to English and global game-based learning

Transcript

[00:00:00] Rohan Mahimker: The primary use case is like independent practice, right? So how can Prodigy be used for independent practice? That's where our adaptive algorithm comes in, and kids can progress at their own pace. And another one is differentiation for teachers. We do this in a few different ways. So if a student is struggling, we can actually tell you in your teacher dashboard exactly which standard and which skill under that standard your students might be struggling in.

There might be like three or four students that are struggling with that specific skill. So now as a teacher we can say, Hey, you might want to pull these four kids aside. And use that to use your next kind of small group instruction block to help educate them or teach 'em on this specific skill.

[00:00:46] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod. Check out our newsletter and also our event calendar.

And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.

We have an amazing guest for this week's episode of EdTech Insiders. We're speaking to Rohan Mahimker. He's the co-founder and CO CEO of Prodigy Education, a global leader in digital game-based learning. Rohan launched Prodigy alongside his fellow co-founder and Co CEO, Alex Peters in 2011 and today, Prodigy's Flagship math game is used by more than 20000001st through eighth grade students, and it's one of the most popular supplementary classroom tools

in the United States, Rohan Mahimker, welcome Ted Tech Insiders.

[00:02:02] Rohan Mahimker: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:02:04] Alex Sarlin: So let's start with the backstory. You co-founded Prodigy in 2011. That's about a decade and a half ago at this point. That's incredible. I'm sure that's amazing to you as well. I think you were a student at the time.

What inspired you and your co-founder, Alex Peters, to launch a game-based learning company? It was a very different era of EdTech. 

[00:02:24] Rohan Mahimker: Yeah, it was certainly a long time ago in the EdTech world. So just for a little bit of background, when we launched Prodigy, Alex and I were engineering students at the University of Waterloo here in Canada, and we started Prodigy as our fourth year symposium project.

So we looked at and reflected back on our own childhoods. And what we enjoyed and what we didn't enjoy. So for me, my parents had put me in an afterschool tutoring program very similar to Kuman, if you've, if you're familiar with that. And the process of learning math for me was going through pages and pages of worksheets.

And I'd still remember the experience of coming home with a stack of worksheets like that thick every week, and having to leaf through these and just absolutely dreading that process as a kid. At the very same time, we really enjoyed video games as kids. So the early Pokemon games on Game Boy, I feel like we're probably from the same generation, were really interesting and appealing.

So we said, Hey, what if we can combine learning with something that is as engaging as a Pokemon style video game? And blend these two things together. I think that would be real magic when it comes to getting students to actually engaged in the learning process. So that was the inspiration behind why we started Prodigy, and we did it as a fourth year project.

We then took a very, very rough kind of alpha prototype and put it in front of some kids after we graduated and it resonated with them and we said, Hey, we might have something on our hands here. So we decided to kind of go forth with it. 

[00:04:00] Alex Sarlin: Tell us about, you can start with what it looked like back then, or even just sort of evolve it in real time to what it's looked like now, but tell us about what the experience is like when you say it resonated with the kids.

It's a very immersive game-based experience. This adventure is this role playing. Mm-hmm. You have a character you're building up, you have spells. Tell us a little bit about what it's like to play Prodigy and how. Really grab kids and get them excited about math beyond worksheet style math. 

[00:04:25] Rohan Mahimker: Definitely.

Yeah. So I'll tell you a little bit about what it looks like now, and then I'll rewind to what the early days look like and how we got here. So currently our flagship RPG game, our role playing game. It's all centered around math. And in this kids get to create their very own wizard avatar. They come into this magical world.

We have our antagonist who's called the puppet master. He's used dark magic to basically turn all the pets in the game or monsters in the game against you. And you are kind of going through this and helping to rescue some of these pets. And you're eventually defeating the puppet master as you go through the storyline of the game.

So it is a very immersive, it's very kind of like Pokemon esque in terms of you're going through the various zones and the various quest lines in there, and kids overwhelmingly get engaged with the storyline. They wanna customize their avatar, they wanna play through it, they wanna add more pets and rescue them and add them to their team.

In order to do any of this, in order to make any progress in the game at all, you have to answer math questions. And that's where the learning comes in. And the beauty of it is the game keeps kids motivated. So we have a philosophy of education that is motivation first. Which means that once you have the motivation, you can really sprinkle in the math and make sure that kids are doing sufficient math and have sufficient time on task.

And our belief is in the long run, that maximizes learning because a kid who does a worksheet now but refuses to tomorrow, they're not gonna make as many gains as a kid who is engaged for months and months or years and years on a product like ours. So that's kind of what the experience looks like now.

Rewinding to when we started, we kind of had just simply two characters on screen and they were in a math battle, so they'd have to answer a question, and if you got that question right, you'd be able to eventually defeat your opponent. And when we put it in front of kids, that general concept was working.

And then what we did in the first year and a half of the business was we were in beta and we fully acknowledged that, hey, we were engineering students. We knew absolutely nothing about the education system. And we just tried to get into classrooms every single day. We sat there in classrooms with kids saying, Hey, like, what do you like, what would you like to see in this game?

And they said, Hey, these monsters that I'm battling. I'd like to capture them as pets. So we added that functionality. We talked to a lot of teachers and said, what would you like to see? And one of the first things we learned, which seems so obvious now and it's it's standard in a lot of products, is they wanted reporting that was aligned to the actual standards.

They wanted drill down capabilities. They wanted things like, if I was working on 3D shapes today in the classroom. Can I give my kids 10 questions on 3D shapes in the game? So we actually ended up pioneering a lot of those features across the industry because we were listening to our teachers and students and really building what they wanted into the product.

[00:07:29] Alex Sarlin: It's a user-based approach. You're co-designing, they call it these days. Right? You're working directly with your end users, and that's the most powerful way to develop a product that people really grow to love and depend on and really care about. Absolutely. And that's incredibly exciting. Absolutely.

Yeah. And so you're doing first through eighth grade math. That's a lot of different kinds of math, right? I mean, by eighth grade we're talking about algebra and geometry. By first grade we're talking about basic functions. How do you think about the math? Piece of this, do you have a math team and an academic team?

And I'm curious how you push it or try to push it beyond, is it the same exact math as you would see in the Kuman worksheets, but in this incredibly engaging environment? Or do you actually play with the math as well? 

[00:08:11] Rohan Mahimker: Yeah, so we actually do a lot of work here as well. So we have a team of educators on our staff.

And they essentially help us to design the education content. They're fully credentialed. I think all or most of them, I think all have a background in the classroom themselves. So they help us design the product from a pedagogical perspective. And what we're looking at there, and the beauty of the game as we've designed it, is we've actually decoupled the math content.

From the game content, and this is a lesson that we learned super early on in one of our first sessions in the classroom, we had, you could select from five spells. And lightning bolt as a spell only gave you multiplication questions. So we found the kids who liked multiplication but wanted to avoid division just kept clicking lightning bolt.

And then we're like, this is great. You're getting really good at multiplication, but you're not actually learning anything new. So our approach is we try to keep kids in their zone of proximal development, and what that means is we try to adapt the content so that it's challenging. But not too challenging to the extent that they get frustrated and give up.

And that's a little bit of our secret sauce in the background. And regardless of if you're like working two grade levels ahead and really excelling, or if you might still have some gaps and you're like one or two grade levels below the rest of your classmates, you still feel like you're playing the exact same game.

And we're helping kids to kind of build their confidence as they're progressing through the 

[00:09:40] Alex Sarlin: curriculum. Yeah. I think that separation, it's a very smart move to separate out, even though it feels intuitive, I think, to say, oh, the game mechanics will be directly based on the math. I remember many years ago trying to create a math game and thinking, oh, like the exponents will be like a magic mirror and you'll multiply by the same things.

But I think what you're saying is a hard earned lesson that I think a lot of other game-based education programs have had to learn as well, which is. You're creating different incentives if the math and the game are too tied together because people are gonna do the parts of the game they like or the do the parts of the math that they find easiest, or there's all sorts of exactly things that happen.

So I'm happy to hear you say that. 

[00:10:18] Rohan Mahimker: And with this approach, there's also no way to avoid questions, right? So as an example, if your teacher wants to work on 2D shapes, because that's what they've taught in the classroom, and they want to give kids 10 questions on 2D shapes as an exit ticket. They can do that as a sneaky assignment or assessment and kids will never know.

They just get the 2D shapes questions, but they can play in the part of the game that they want to play in. So it's kind of a win-win on both sides. 

[00:10:46] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. They sometimes call that stealth assessment right in the literature that you actually are able to assess interesting things within the context of something that the kids might be doing otherwise, and they feel no stress about it.

They're, it's not high stakes. They're like. Oh, this is already what I'm excited to do. There's so many benefits I think in that approach. You've mentioned this, but I'd love to hear you dive into it. There's different ways of determining what math gets in front of what kid, right? You could, the kid could, might be extending and accelerating past what they're doing in class.

They may be staying right on what they're doing in class. They may be. Behind filling gaps and they may be doing things that the teachers are assigning them. I'd love to hear you talk about that. What are the different ways in which the particular math is assigned to any individual kid, and how do you think about the differentiation aspect of it?

[00:11:28] Rohan Mahimker: Yeah, it's a really good question. So the first thing we do is we make sure that we are working on the right curriculum and the right set of standards. So for example, if you're in California, you'll get the California Common Core standards. If you're in Texas, you'll get the TE standards, which is kind of the standards in Texas.

So. We want that base level alignment so that when a teacher puts their students on Prodigy. In Texas, they're not working on like the Mississippi standards. So that's kind of number one. Number two is as kids are progressing through the game, the first thing that we do is we actually run everyone through a placement test.

Mm. And that happens automatically in the background. Again, it's like a stealth test because kids don't know that they're going through it, but we figure out where their strengths are, where some of their gaps are potentially. And then after that, as they've progressed through the content, our algorithm adapts.

And as an example of that, let's say I'm working on comparing fractions with a denominator of five. Maybe my gap, and I'm getting that question wrong, maybe my gap is that I don't know how to multiply by fives. Then it'll pull me back to multiply nine fives. If I'm still struggling with that, it might pull me back to skip counting by fives and if I'm still struggling, skip counting by ones or twos.

So you really try to figure out what the prerequisite skill is that the students might be missing, and then try to address that skill with them and then kind of scaffold them back up to grade level and where they should be. So that's kind of how we approach the. Ensuring that kids are working on the content that is appropriate for them.

And then obviously if a teacher wants to do an assignment in Prodigy, that just supersedes our curriculum. 

[00:13:09] Alex Sarlin: That makes a lot of sense. And then I'm sure over the years you've seen many, many kids who are using Prodigy to really, because motivation first, right? They're excited about the game, they're excited about what they're doing.

They're probably going really deep into all of these math subjects and mastering all these concepts, sort of moving beyond grade level. I'd love to hear you talk about that and what that feels like as a founder. 

[00:13:30] Rohan Mahimker: Yeah, it was fantastic. I actually wanna share a story here with you, if you don't mind. A few years ago I was at a conference in, I believe, Texas, and there was a parent from another ed tech company, so it wasn't like an educator or teacher, and he ran up to us and he was like, oh my God, you guys are prodigy.

Let me tell you something. His kid who was in kindergarten at the time, so he hadn't even started grade school, he was like, he loves your game so much. He plays this every night for like two or three hours. And he had gone through our grade one content, grade two, grade three, and he is like halfway through grade four.

And this parent was just so ecstatic and he is like, I work with him and help address some of the gaps where he is struggling. But the thing about math is it's all cumulative. Right, and I'm sure you've seen this in your work as well, where if you have some of the prerequisite skills. You should have the foundations to address what the next skill is in the math curriculum.

So if you, again, coming back to that example, to multiply by fives, if you can skip count by fives, you can kind of figure out how to do that. So there's really no limit if a student is sufficiently engaged in how far they can progress through the math curriculum. 

[00:14:38] Alex Sarlin: That juxtaposition of those two different worlds that you mentioned, the realization that you and your co-founder had that you could take these.

Stack of worksheets that is not very motivating and combine it with the motivational storytelling, sort of immersive nature of gaming is a huge leap, but you're not the only ones who have ever had that leap. People have been trying to figure out how to put gaming and education together for quite a long time, and yet I don't think there have been that many super successful attempts, even though you can go to the app store and find many people trying.

I'm curious what you attribute the success of Prodigy. Two, you've been at it for a decade and a half. You've grown to millions and millions of students, and I feel like you've sort of proven out this thesis that you really can put together education and gaming in a way that's effective on both sides.

But I'm curious what you think of sort of all the, also rans, all the other people on the side of the road of the last decade who have been trying that and have not quite found that right match. I 

[00:15:37] Rohan Mahimker: think the big challenge when it comes to really leveraging game-based learning and education is you need to balance the pedagogy with the gameplay.

And it sounds simple, but it's not quite as trivial in practice because for a teacher to use, so if I'm, let's say a third grade teacher and I want to bring in a product using the the classroom, I need to make sure it has a certain amount of time on tasks that is acceptable to me because. I don't want my kids to be doing purely entertainment games in the classroom.

They need to be actually practicing and learning something. Otherwise, it's just not an effective use of my classroom time. At the same time, there are students who would really engage with the entertainment value within the game. So you really need to balance kind of those two factors off. That's one big thing, and that's being kind of our secret sauce, and we have refined that through a lot of interactions with our users.

The second thing is when we started, when we went to the early kind of beta classrooms that we tried to test the game with. When we looked at what was on their computer, it was still like Math Circus. And I was like, wait a minute. I played Math Circus as a kid in the classroom and math flasher and stuff like that.

So I think one of the other reasons why a lot of the game-based learning solutions hadn't taken off is because. There wasn't a good business model behind them. And that was the other thing that we had kind of innovated in and pioneered, which is this freemium model where we provided a lot of the value that teachers want actually all of the value that teachers want, and zero cost to them.

And we found a way to make this a real business and monetize it. By getting kids to ask their parents for a premium membership, and then a small percentage of those families who actually pay us end up financing the model for everyone else. 

[00:17:27] Alex Sarlin: I'd love to talk more about that model if you're open to it, because I, I agree.

I you pioneered it and it is something that is, I think, really revolutionary, frankly, in the ed tech space. Let's talk about the school side first, because what's I think so unique about that business model is that you have many different stakeholders in it. You have to satisfy, right? You need parents to be.

Very happy that their student is doing Prodigy at home and that they're getting reports. You need teachers to be so happy that they're getting all of this value for free and they wanna use it and they want to make it happen in the classroom. You need students, of course, to be motivated and excited.

It's a tricky balance, but one that has enormous upsides. Let's start with the, the school side. Teachers, we talk on this podcast all the time about how difficult it can be to get into schools. Teachers have lots to do. They don't always have room for new tools. How have you designed the Prodigy platform so that teachers can embrace it and use it and do those exit tickets and do those assignments, and it doesn't feel like yet another tech tool that's on their plate to have to learn.

[00:18:27] Rohan Mahimker: This is something we actually focused on super early on in the business. So there's multiple stakeholders that we have. There's obviously students, teachers, parents, school administrators. Within the school administrator bucket, you have the tech directors, you have the curriculum directors, and the curriculum teams, the schools, et cetera.

It won't get into all of that, but on an education side, we really tried to make sure that we were addressing specific use cases. For teachers in the classroom. So the primary use case is like independent practice, right? So how can Prodigy be used for independent practice? That's where our adaptive algorithm comes in, and kids can progress at their own pace.

And another one is differentiation for teachers. We do this in a few different ways. So if a student is struggling, we can actually tell you in your teacher dashboard exactly which standard and which skill under that standard your students might be struggling in. There might be like three or four students that are struggling with that specific skill.

So now as a teacher we can say, Hey, you might want to pull these four kids aside. And use that to use your next kind of small group instruction block to help educate them or teach 'em on this specific skill. Another thing is there's the exit ticket use case, so that's where we've added functionality, like our assignment feature.

There is like a formative assessment use case, and again, you can use our assignment feature. We've added a feature called Quick quiz, which essentially. Allows teachers to do, if you want to do a really quick warmup, your whole class is working on Prodigy at the same time and you want them to practice a specific skill, you can set that it's much higher time on task than the regular game, and you can kind of get those questions in in a quick warmup format.

So I think what it comes down to is. We're really assessing what teachers need to do as part of their day-to-day and their math lesson, and how can we fit into specific use cases there. And then the second innovation obviously, is we've made all of that available for free. So our goal is to have a. Best in class teacher platform, you have all of the features and functionality that you might find on products that your school or district would typically pay thousands of dollars for, and that's available to you at no cost.

So it's a bit of a no brainer for teachers. You get the product that's really engaging, you get all the functionality you need. 

[00:20:49] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Now let's talk about the student side because you have, the students play a very unique role in this model, which is really, I think, exciting. They play a lot of agency in this model.

They get to be using Prodigy in the classroom in all of the different ways that you just mentioned as exit tickets and formative assessments and independent practice. And then they serve as these mini ambassadors back to the home and say, I love playing Prodigy. I wanna continue to build out my character.

I wanna continue to explore more parts of this world. Mom, dad, can we subscribe? You know, it's such an elegant piece of your model, but it's also, I imagine, a little bit of a tricky one because you wanna make sure that you don't feel like you're advertising to students. You don't wanna feel like it feels too, you know, there's a potential for a tricky experience there, which I think you've navigated very well.

How do you approach the student side and the transfer from the school to the home? 

[00:21:40] Rohan Mahimker: Yeah, so before I get into that, I want to highlight one of the challenges that comes with typical like free products in the classroom. And one of the big challenges is if everything is free, then you still need to find another way to monetize the product.

That's where like third party advertising comes in. That's where something like data mining comes in and you can kind of resell that data. We've been very, very careful not to do any of that. And the model that we found is it's kids only get kind of first party prompts to potentially upgrade if they run into one of the features that they need a membership for.

And to give you an example of what some of those might be. I can, for example, capture more pets in the game as a member versus a non-member, you still have pets as a non-member, you can just get more, I can get like cooler outfits and clothes for my avatar if I have a membership. And so we've borrowed this element in business model of having these vanity game features, which kids really enjoy and can't potentially increase their engagement.

But at the same time, we've been very careful to keep all of the math content in Prodigy. All of the English content as well in our English game entirely free. So a free user can use it, a paid user can use it. There is actually no difference in access. So the last thing that I'll say here is we wanted to design a business model because our mission at Prodigy is to help every student in the world to love learning.

You can't do that if there is a fee to enter your product, right? So we've tried to design the business model so that it's a win-win, win for all stakeholders. We as a company only make money if your student is so engaged that they're actually playing Prodigy at home, and that they're actually doing so much stuff within the game, that they go home and ask their parent for a membership.

And by extension, if they have that level of engagement, they also have really high learning on platform. Because in order to make any progress on Prodigy, you have to do the math, right? And we try to progress, get through the curriculum as I, as I described earlier. So I do think it's a model that that serves all of our stakeholders and, and we are able to sustain ourselves as a business as well.

[00:23:52] Alex Sarlin: Yes. Well, another really interesting aspect of it, I'd love to ask you about it, is the parents side. Because when you mention, which I think is a very noble and absolutely the right approach, to say that you know what you're unlocking by being a member, by having a family actually subscribe. Vanity things and this vanity makes it sound bad, but you know, it's game items that make you, that you can dress in really cool ways or have more pets or you know, the things you're mentioning.

I imagine that for a parent who's deciding whether to invest in an ed tech tool, their decision process is, there's lots of different things going on in there, but. There is a story that you could tell that says, oh, your kid is doing X, Y, Z at school in Prodigy, but you want them to get into advanced math and get into calculus and get into a great college, and that's why you subscribe.

And that is absolutely not your messaging at all. Instead, it's. They love doing it and get them to spend more time in the game doing math. But I'd love to hear you talk through, because that feels like you, I imagine being in the room inside Prodigy, making these decisions and it, it's a little bit of a, a tricky bridge to, you're doing the right thing, but it also may be something that flies in the face a little bit of some of the parent motivation.

I'm curious how you approach that. 

[00:25:02] Rohan Mahimker: It certainly does. So what parents are used to paying for EdTech products is education content. We've said we're gonna give all of our education content out for free. So it's a bit of a weird model and, and, and value proposition there. We still do have parents, to be totally honest with you, that are like, Hey, you know, I get my kid gets all the education for free.

I'm not gonna pay for this. That's totally fine. What we have decided internally is we're actually capturing, not kind of straddling between the educational spend. That parents have a shared wallet for, and the entertainment spend as well. So our real value proposition is. Instead of paying for Roblox or a PlayStation game, why don't you spend that money on Prodigy instead and you know that your kid will actually be learning something.

And by the way, they actually like playing Prodigy at home just as much as some of the other video games that they're playing. 

[00:25:52] Alex Sarlin: I think that's what's so exciting about that strategy is that it forces you in a, in the best way to be competitive for Mindshare with entertainment products, which is something that I think a lot of education companies don't feel like they even have a possibility of doing.

They say, oh, well the kids we're gonna go home, they're gonna play Roblox, they're gonna watch Netflix. We're competing with the classroom. You know, we have to be more entertaining than. The math teacher, but that's not how you're approaching it at all. You're saying, no, we want kids to be doing this as much.

Think of Prodigy in the same breath as entertainment products and therefore the parents will pay for it as an entertainment product. I'd love to hear you talk more about that because I don't think that is the most common mentality for Red Tech founders. 

[00:26:33] Rohan Mahimker: You've captured exactly the biggest challenge for us at home, which is in the classroom.

We wanna make sure that we're engaging enough, but also have enough T time on task for the teachers to justify using Prodigy in the classroom, which we think we do satisfy very well. But at home we're competing not with other edutainment products necessarily. Kind of primarily we're competing with pure games.

And so our largest team in the company is actually our game team. I believe it. And there's about 90 people there, and they're trying to build the best video game possible for kids so that we are competitive from an engagement perspective with some of the other things that kids would potentially play at home.

[00:27:12] Alex Sarlin: As somebody who's, who's followed this world of, of education and gaming and how they come together for a long time, that is the dream, right? That is the dream of being able to have educational products that compete on an entertainment level with entertainment products because it is something I think many of us in EdTech felt like that was out of reach.

I think you've been, you've been sort of proving them wrong for now, quite a while. It's really exciting. Let's talk about the Prodigy State Challenge. This is a really interesting aspect of your business as well. It's the world's largest math competition, and it's only in its second year now, but that's so exciting.

Tell us about what this looks like and what impact you feel like it's, uh, having and going to have on student motivation and math and math anxiety. 

[00:27:53] Rohan Mahimker: Yeah, so where the Prodigy State Challenge came from, and to give you an overview of what it is, is. You can essentially compete. As a school against other schools in your state every single month.

And it's a very simple metric. It's just whoever answers the most math questions. So it's, you know, fully tied to the education content. And then at the end of the year we have kind of our Prodigy National Cup, which is really exciting because schools across various states. Now compete for to be the national champion.

So last year was our first year in doing this. We're happy to say this was the world's largest math competition. We had about 70,000 schools across the US participate. In the state challenge, there were like 4.2 million students that had contributed within those schools. Incredible. And I got to visit the winning school and they were just ecstatic at their, at their win.

They had beat out every other school across the nation. They had answered about 730,000 math questions, oh my God. In like two weeks in order to beat out the other schools in their and, and their finals. So those teachers were, you know, fully bought in on how beneficial. A game-based learning approach could be to help their students to excel in math, and they also got the grand prize, which is a hundred thousand dollars tech grant from Prodigy.

So it was just a, a really good way to celebrate what comes down to, you know, the students' achievement in answering a ton of math questions and making progress. 

[00:29:28] Alex Sarlin: It also reminds me of a sort of best practice in the gamification world, which is having team leaderboards, right? And competing as a group, rather than competing as an individual so that everybody can contribute.

You know? So in that school you probably had kids answering a thousand math questions or 10,000 math questions, and some kids answering, you know, 20 math questions based on where they're at, where their ability, their motivation. But they all got to sort of work together and feel that motivation and be competing with other schools.

[00:29:54] Rohan Mahimker: Exactly and putting yourself back to elementary school, your natural rival is kind of the school across the street, right? So, or the school of the next town. So it's a really fun way to also get some of those competitive juices flowing and, and have kids competing. With other schools, with their peers and with their classmates versus kind of working independently.

[00:30:16] Alex Sarlin: And I imagine the teachers, we are also feel competitive and excited about that idea of their school being, you know, a math champion. Absolutely. We can't go any episode of EdTech and Centers without talking about this, at least a little bit, but I think it's a particularly relevant to Prodigy is that we are entering this really interesting era of AI development where AI can create both learning content at a scale that we're, we're really not.

You know, we've never seen before. And it can create assets, it can create pictures, it can create dialogue, it can create game assets. I'm curious if you've begun to think about that AI world and how it might accelerate development, both for the educational side of an EdTech product like yours and the entertainment side of an EdTech product like yours, what do you think that's gonna look like over the next few years?

[00:31:04] Rohan Mahimker: Yeah, this is a really exciting trend. We are admittedly a little behind where I would want to be in terms of our, our full kind of embrace of, of ai, but there are a few ways that we've been using this internally to, you know, help with some of the content generation, both on the game side and on the education side, as you said.

The one thing that I'll stress is everything has a human in the loop that we do. So one of our big internal bars is we wanna make sure that the educational content is of a certain quality, and in order to do that, it's not just AI generated. We have someone reviewing everything, even if we do use AI in that loop.

The other thing is I think it can help a ton with art as well. So for example, some of our concept artists. Use AI to generate a whole bunch of concepts for pets, and then we can kind of leverage some of those concepts that we like and then polish them further from there. So there's a lot of exciting stuff on the internal side.

On the external side, I would say AI's also super interesting. What I've seen thus far in some of the kind of conferences and looking at some of the, the others in, in EdTech is there, there are a few different categories of AI products. So you have the like worksheet. Generation tools overgeneralizing, but generally like they, they help you generate a bunch of content and you can kind of give your kids that content or share it.

There is the teacher assistance and then there is the tutors that can potentially help students. The holy grail of AI is really getting to the tutoring side and kind of fully solving that. And on that, I would say. I haven't seen anyone do it like super, super well. There's a couple companies that I think are getting getting close, which are, which are exciting.

We've done some playing around with some prototypes internally. Nothing even close to kind of launching or, or putting in front of customers just yet. But there is some exciting stuff and especially as the models are getting better, I think there is the promise of that, that coming to market. The other thing I'll say there is like if one of our learnings from the early prototypes.

Is there are a lot of edge cases, so it's easy to get this to like something that roughly works. It's very hard to get this to something that like. Teaches considering the right pedagogy, for example, right? So if you're in Texas, you want to make sure that you're aligning to how things are taught in the teak standards.

In Texas, it's very hard to make sure that it's using the appropriate language for students, depending on their, their age, and making sure that the approaches that the AI is suggesting when it's helping to teach kids. Are consistent with what the teacher would use in the classroom. So those are some of the considerations.

Obviously, student safety is another big consideration as well, but it is a really, really exciting space. 

[00:33:53] Alex Sarlin: Absolutely. And I mean, I think one of the interesting, you know, opportunities but also constraints of being a sort of industry leader and having millions of students and, and, and teachers already in your product is that you want to be very thoughtful and careful about, you know, anything you do using AI that might threaten the quality of your content or threaten the experience at all because you've worked so hard for over a decade to really optimize it in so many different ways that, that you have to be.

Careful as a industry leader, but you also have the opportunity to anything you do that once, once the pieces are in place, the data sets the, you know, the tutor moves. The idea of how does this all work? You have the ability to do it at great scale and test it and refine it at great scale. So it's sort of a double-edged sword.

Absolutely. 

[00:34:39] Rohan Mahimker: The other thing I'll add there is our philosophy internally is that the teacher is really a fundamental stakeholder in the child's learning journey. So a lot of the nearer term things that we're doing with AI is like, can we intelligently suggest things that the teacher can do to differentiate?

Can we group students more intelligently? Can we surface better insights? Can we surface predictive insights in some of the, the teacher reporting and dashboards that we have? So I think the more that we equip teachers, the better they will be able to leverage our tool to help their kids. 

[00:35:12] Alex Sarlin: Makes a lot of sense.

I'm curious about two aspects of this future of, of Prodigy. One is you mentioned grouping students there, and one thing that I always think is an interesting aspect of the the game-based education world is that. Often game-based education is based on, as you say, like a Pokemon style game. A game that is where the student and the computer, you know, the student is making their way through an adventure or creating a character on their own.

But we also, I think as educators, all appreciate social learning or group learning, or collaborative problem solving. And I'm curious how you think about that within the context of Prodigy. Either things you've already done or that you, you know, are thinking about doing in the future. Is there a world in which.

A group of kids can become a, you know, a guild or a team and have all of their characters doing an adventure together, and every problem is something they actually have to, you know, discuss and, and come up with a solution. That sounds like a pretty exciting product. 

[00:36:07] Rohan Mahimker: That would be really interesting.

That's not quite our focus, to be totally honest, but that is something that, like in the game, for example. Kids can see their classmates and it is a online social world, so kids can kind of interact with each other. One of the things that we have been very cautious about is student safety as they're doing that, so there is no free chat.

We have had repeated requests for kids to see like. Can I talk to my friends? Can I message them in the game? And there are a lot of potential consequences and coaches when it comes to that from a safety perspective. So we've been really careful to avoid any of that. But to the extent that it can be safely used to help encourage students and create more motivation, I think that's, that's a real win for everybody.

One of the use cases that we do see to that point for Prodigy is if kids are playing. Beside each other in the class, they can actually lean over and ask their friends, Hey, can you help me to solve this problem? We've heard of kids at home as well who like FaceTime each other and they're both playing Prodigy together.

So kids do find ways around it, but we wanna make sure that the, the game environment that we have at itself is, is a safe environment for kids. 

[00:37:17] Alex Sarlin: That makes a ton of sense and I think you're putting your finger on as you've had so much experience there on so many of the aspects of it. You know, the chats in entertainment games when people are doing things together are not safe spaces at all.

They're some of the least safe spaces, I think, on the internet. So you have to be very, very careful about creating open chat or any way to communicate and yeah, it makes a lot of sense. 

[00:37:38] Rohan Mahimker: Yeah. I'll give you another fun story there from our early days, which is we wanted to give kids the ability to name their pets.

In Prodigy we're like, Hey, you know, it'll be a fun exercise, you know, and kids make, might feel more affinity to it. We had one of our best engineers who has a master's in AI design, a profanity filter, and within like minutes, kids had put all sorts of weird things in. There're like there are hyphens in different places or abbreviations.

It's just like. We took that away pretty quickly. Yeah. But it is funny how inventive kids are when it comes to, uh, circumventing some of the systems that we might create there. 

[00:38:19] Alex Sarlin: It really is, and I think you're highlighting something that I think is one of the most intriguing parts of the gaming and education overlap, which is games try to create.

Autonomy within constraints, right? They, they give mm-hmm. Students choices at agency and the ability to, to make things happen. But it's within the constraints of a game world. And then when you add, when you're, you're under 13 users and you're in school environments where those constraints lie, is like this huge.

So I mean, the idea of being able to name, uh, character, that's like a go-to in many entertainment games. But you gotta be really, really thoughtful about it because kids will be inventive. They will find, they will find the cracks in the system. And we, we know that's coming. And you can't outsmart the kids.

You really can't. The other thing I wanted to ask you about, and this sort of overlaps with the AI piece, but it's something that I know you're already been doing, a lot of this sort of extension of differentiation is individualization or even, you know, people call it personalization and I'm curious how you see.

The future of that within the prodigy ecosystem are, are there worlds in which you already mentioned how, you know, a kid who is struggling with a problem could get prerequisite concepts and go all the way back to, you know, core underlying principles and go up from there. Or they could extend into different areas.

But with this new databased AI world we're entering, how do you envision the future of sort of personalized learning in a prodigy like gaming environment? 

[00:39:37] Rohan Mahimker: Yeah, I think one of the other benefits of AI is you can potentially do a lot more teaching with assistance from AI within an educational game. So again, this is something that we are still like very, very early on.

I think it can potentially help kids to accelerate on an independent basis when you might be playing at home and you might not have your teacher or parent available. We try to do a very rudimentary version of this with our algorithm itself, and we try to make sure that we personalize and there's those like hints and help content for every question within the prodigy world as well if kids get stuck.

But I think there's, there's a lot of promise in potentially using AI for this as well. 

[00:40:19] Alex Sarlin: And just as you were mentioning, there's AI for the, the storytelling in the gaming world, and there's AI for the educational world. That's also true of personalization, right? I mean, you could imagine kids doing personalized quests or personalized adventures that are, you know, of, of interest to them to keep that motivation pie, that motivation first approach.

Or you could consider. Personalization on the math level, or they could even combine. I mean, maybe the math questions are all about the pets that the kid already has collected. I mean, there's just so many ways to tweak things and move them around. If you have a sophisticated enough system underneath looking at all the data, I know you're already doing that on many ways.

[00:40:54] Rohan Mahimker: Those are great ideas, Alex. I'm gonna write some of these down. 

[00:40:59] Alex Sarlin: I love this world, but part of why I've been so excited to talk to you about what you're incredible. I really think you've done something. Really stupendous in the EdTech space. I've mentioned this on the podcast before, but I did my master's thesis about Club Penguin and World of Warcraft and Second Life, and it was basically, it was literally about how the avatar, the kids who have their own avatars and they can dress them up, they can use the dress, the clothing to represent their expertise in education world and how that was a really interesting, you know, dynamic.

That was my, my Master's thesis was about 20 years ago. I love this space and I think you've really made it real. At an enormous scale with, you know, 4 million students competing in a math contest at a time. So I, I'm just in, in awe of what you've done at Prodigy. I think it's truly spectacular. I'd love to hear you think about, you know, the next few years, and we don't have to talk about the AI of it, we haven't mentioned the English product for, uh, very example, I'd love to hear you talk about the English side of Prodigy because between ELA and math.

You are right at the core of what schools are wrestling to get their scores up in. How did you think about the English product and just in general, what do you think is the future over the next few years of Prodigy? 

[00:42:05] Rohan Mahimker: Yeah. There are a couple of different vectors here. One is, how can we help kids to cover the entire curriculum through a game-based learning approach and apply.

What we've learned for on the math side in building this flagship kind of math game to other subjects as well. So English is our second product and we have a lot of students using English as well, not as much as the math game, but it's kind of in the millions. And we are also looking at other subjects.

So ideally, anything you can learn, grades one through eight, you should be able to do it through this kind of game-based learning, self-paced approach. The other one that we're looking at, and this has also made way, way easier with ai, is how can we internationalize and help translate Prodigy and bring this benefit to more students around the world?

Most LLMs now actually can do translation like pretty well out of the box. Again, there are some constraints for us specifically just given the space that we're in to make sure that the language is appropriate for like a five-year-old, but I think it's a, it's a really interesting possibility. And then the other one, which is, is what kind of what we touched on, which is how can we continue to enhance our value proposition and feature set for teachers, for students, for parents, giving them the insights that they need, really satisfying those use cases.

So that is something that is just an ongoing thing in the background that we, we continue to work on. 

[00:43:30] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, those are exciting visions. More subjects, more countries and languages, and then of course, continue to improve that core prodigy experience and bring the teaching close to the student actual experience within a prodigy environment.

It's really, really exciting. It's been such a fascinating interview. I really appreciate your time here. Rohan Mahimker is the co-founder and CO CEO of Prodigy Education. It is a global leader in digital game-based learning. Their math game is used by more than 20000001st to eighth grade students. Their English game is used by millions as well, and after 15 years, they're still just getting started as an industry leader.

It's really, really exciting. Thank you so much for being here with us. On EdTech Insiders.

[00:44:12] Rohan Mahimker: Thank you so much. I had a lot of fun.

[00:44:15] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider, subscribe to the Free EdTech Insiders Newsletter on substack.