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Designing a real-time whole-class game mode to reclaim in-class math time. Quick Quiz drove a +6% lift in teacher activation and repositioned Prodigy from a "free time" game to an in-class review tool.
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For many years, Prodigy was synonymous with "free time." Teachers often assigned it during station rotation, free choice time, or allowed students to play Prodigy once they were finished their main work. But post-COVID, classroom realities shifted dramatically. Behavioral regression, widening learning gaps, and tighter schedules meant free time was disappearing.
Meanwhile, competitors were moving fast. EdTech tools designed for structured, high time on task, whole-class use were gaining traction, and Prodigy's activation numbers were declining. In order to maintain our place in the classroom we needed to evolve.
Post-COVID classrooms had less unstructured time than ever before.
Teacher activation was trending downwards, dropping by -17% YOY in Q2 of 2024.
Prodigy's game codebase was over a decade old.
New features had to work within significant technical constraints and existing data pipelines.
The Game Team and "Grown-ups" Team rarely shipped a feature together.
Competing priorities and processes made clear communication vital.
In order to regain footing in the classroom, Prodigy needed to support new use cases. Market research conducted by an outside firm pointed to whole-class review, specifically “entrance” and “exit” tickets, as our biggest opportunity. These tickets were essentially mini quizzes leveraged by teachers at the beginning and end of class to quickly gauge student understanding on a specific topic.
This left us to answer the question...
Transform Prodigy from an independent reward activity into a synchronous, teacher-led classroom tool, using our existing game infrastructure?
Before jumping into design work, I needed to understand the new market segment we were looking to step into. At the same, with the project starting in Q4, the team was under pressure to ship quickly in order to launch in time for teachers going back to school following winter break. Missing this deadline meant waiting until Fall 2025 for another chance to meaningfully address the decline in teacher activation.
Our tight timelines required scrappy thinking. I conducted a focused competitor analysis, interviewed in-house education specialists (all of whom were former teachers), and synthesized existing research on post-COVID classroom dynamics. The goal wasn't exhaustive research, it was rapidly gathering enough of a signal to move confidently..
Based on these insights, I framed a hypothesis: If we strip away Prodigy's game distractions and give teachers real-time control over a focused quiz experience, we can unlock a new in-class use case.
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With insights in hand, I began exploring what the teacher side of a synchronous classroom experience could look like. I partnered closely with our in-house Education Specialists to workshop early concepts, pressure-testing ideas against their experience with real classroom scenarios.
At the same time, the game team worked to design a new focused game mode that leveraged our existing battle mechanics and question interface, limiting distractions and increasing time on task.
Throughout this process, our teams met weekly to ensure we were designing puzzle pieces that fit together. Keeping expectations aligned and validating assumptions throughout the project was critical.
Early ideas explored the possibility of generating premade Quick Quizes for users, either using our algorithm or AI, then allowing users to customize individual questions within the quiz. Teachers could add, remove, or replace questions quickly from the editing experience.
From my research, I knew teachers wanted more granular control over the content students encountered. These changes were descoped due to technical constraints, but the improvements we made to the assignment flow through the launch of Quick Quiz laid the groundwork for us to come back to this at a later date.
Quick Quiz required close collaboration between two teams that rarely worked together: the Game Team (focused on student experience) and the Grown-ups Team (focused on teacher tools). Different codebases. Different priorities. Different ways of working.
My role became as much about helping the team to navigate tradeoffs and prioritize requirements, as it was about design. In practice, this looked like...
Rather than building a new system from scratch, I worked with engineering to repurpose existing assignment override logic. This allowed us to "force" students into Quick Quiz mode without creating new infrastructure. Keeping the behaviour consistent between the two assignment types also made maintenance easier, as we didn't have to support two separate systems.
Teachers needed real-time visibility into whether students were actually ready to play. Because this synchronous model was new, we didn’t have a framework in place that communicated student state to the teacher app. I partnered with engineering to utilize existing student user tags to surface meaningful participation signals through our established data pipelines.
Many younger students didn’t have accounts or couldn’t remember their login details, which meant completing Prodigy’s 10+ minute onboarding before joining Quick Quiz. To prevent this from blocking participation, I worked with the Game team to negotiate a condensed onboarding focused solely on core mechanics. Students could jump into the quiz immediately and were returned to the full onboarding flow afterward.
Quick Quiz needed to survive the chaos of real +20 student classrooms with issues like varying internet connections, different reading levels, mixed comfort levels with technology, and behavioral challenges. Because of this, I knew we needed to see it live in action.
Through a teacher friend of mine I was able to organized scrappy in-class tests with local teachers and their students.
Being able to see real teachers and students using the feature was invaluable. It gave us the confidence to move forward with the feature and helped us to identify urgent issues and potential improvements. The research plan for this study is available here, along with the test plan, test script, task list, and note taker document.
The work required to build Quick Quiz exposed inefficiencies and poor user experiences in our assignment creation flow and assignment reports. I leveraged the momentum to drive changes that benefited the entire product.
By approaching the Quick Quiz project holistically, I was able to design a feature that met user and business needs while making much needed improvements to core sections of the existing assignment experience.
Quick Quiz delivered results across key metrics, driving a +6% increase in teacher activations, which had been consistantly declining for more than a year. This validated the hypothesis that providing teachers with a focused quiz experience could increase Prodigy usage in classrooms.
Teacher activation in the first month
Increase in assignment creation
Increase in assignment completion
Lift in student play time
Beyond metrics, Quick Quiz shifted how the market perceived Prodigy. We were no longer competing only for "free time", we were now a legitimate option for structured classroom use.
Quick Quiz was one of the more complex projects I've led, not because of the design itself, but because of the organizational, technical, and strategic challenges it presented.
