Edtech Insiders - Podcast Interview

This interview was first broadcast on Edtech Insiders on November 16 2025. Link to the show can be found here. The transcript below has been edited for clarity and brevity.

ALEX SARLIN - Edtech Insiders:
Alright. Welcome back everyone to another episode. Today we’ve got a really special guest — someone I’ve been wanting to speak with for a long time. He’s the co-founder and co-CEO of Prodigy Education. You probably know the game Prodigy Math, your kids might be playing it right now. It’s used by millions of students and teachers across North America. This is a fun one. Rohan Mahimker is here with us. Rohan, thanks so much for taking the time to join.

ROHAN - Co-CEO, Prodigy Education:
Yeah, absolutely — thanks so much for having me. Really excited to chat today.

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Founding Prodigy: The Inspiration Behind Game-Based Learning

ALEX:
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? 

ROHAN:
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 looked 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 after school tutoring program, and the process of learning math for me was going through pages and pages of worksheets. I'd still remember the experience of coming home with a stack of worksheets every week, and having to leaf through these, just absolutely dreading that process as a kid. At the very same time, we really enjoyed video games as kids. So we said, hey, what if we can combine learning with something that is as engaging as a video game, and blend these two things together? I think that there can be real magic when it comes to getting students actually engaged in the learning process. 

How Prodigy makes math fun and engaging

ALEX:
Tell us a little bit about what it's like to play Prodigy. How do you get them excited about math beyond worksheet style math?

ROHAN:
Our flagship RPG game—our role playing game—is all centered around math. 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. Kids overwhelmingly get engaged with the storyline. They want to customize their avatar. They want to play through it. They want to add more pets and rescue them and have them to their team. And 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.

ALEX
You're doing first through eighth grade math. How do you think about the math piece of this? Do you have a math team and an academic team?

ROHAN
We have a team of educators on our staff, and they essentially help us to design the education content. They're fully credentialed and all have background in the classroom themselves, so they help us design the product from a pedagogical perspective. Our approach is we try to keep kids in their zone of proximal development. 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. We're helping kids to kind of build their confidence as they're progressing through the 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.

How Prodigy supports differentiated learning

ALEX
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?

ROHAN
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 standards there and so on. So that's kind of number one. Number two is, when kids first play we run everyone through a placement test, 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 progress through the content, our algorithm adapts. As an example of that, let's say I'm working on comparing fractions with denominator of five. Maybe my gap is that I don't know how to multiply by fives, then it'll pull me back to multiply by fives. If I'm still struggling with that, it might pull me back to skip counting by fives, and 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. 

ALEX
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 is effective on both sides. But I'm curious what you think of all the other people on the side of the road over the last decade who have been trying that and have not quite found that right match. 

ROHAN:
I think the big challenge when it comes to really leveraging gamebased learning and education is you need to balance the pedagogy with the gameplay. It sounds simple, but it's not quite as trivial in practice. Let's say a third grade teacher and I want to bring in a product using the classroom, I need to make sure it has a certain amount of time on task 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. 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.

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. This is where we provided all of the value that teachers want, at zero cost to them. And and then a small percentage of those families who actually pay (for a membership) end up financing the model for everyone else.

ALEX
How have you designed the Prodigy platform so that teachers can embrace it?

ROHAN:
On the education side we really tried to make sure that we were addressing specific use cases for teachers in the classroom. So the primary use cases is 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. So if a student is struggling, we can actually tell you in your teacher dashboard exactly which standard and which skill under that standard their students might be struggling in. So now, as a teacher, 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 them 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 warm up, your whole class is working on Prodigy at this 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 warm up 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.

How Prodigy stays free for all teachers

ALEX
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. It's such an elegant piece of your model, but it's also, I imagine, a little bit of a tricky one, because you want to make sure that you don't feel like you're advertising to students. I think you've navigated very well. How do you approach the student side and the transfer from the school to the home?

ROHAN
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. 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. To give you an example of what some of those might be—you can capture more pets in the game as a member versus a non member. So we've borrowed this element and 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. 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. 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. So I do think it's a model that serves all of our stakeholders, and we are able to sustain ourselves as a business as well.

We still do have parents, to be totally honest with you, that are like ‘hey, my kid gets all the education for free. I'm not going to pay for this.’ That's totally fine. 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 also like playing Prodigy just as much as these other games.

ALEX:
It forces you in the best way to be competitive for mindshare with entertainment products. Most EdTech products are competing with the classroom, but that’t not your approach - you want Prodigy to be spoken of in the same breath as entertainment products at home. 

ROHAN:
You've captured exactly the biggest challenge for us at home, which is in the classroom. We want to make sure that we are engaging enough, but also have enough time on task for the teachers to justify using product in the classroom, which we think we do satisfy very well. But at home, we're competing not with other edutainment products necessarily, we're competing with pure games. And so our largest team in the company is actually our game team and they're trying to build the best video game possible for kids so that we are competitive from an engagement perspective.

Making math a team sport with the Prodigy State Challenge

ALEX:
Let's talk about the Prodigy State Challenge. 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 having and going to have on student motivation and math and math anxiety.

ROHAN:
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 (correctly). So it's fully tied to the education content. And then at the end of the year, we have the Prodigy National Cup, which is really exciting, because schools across various states now compete for to be the national champion. We're happy to say this is the world's largest math competition. We had about 70,000 schools across the US participate in the State Challenge. There are like 4.2 million students that had contributed within those schools, and I got to visit the winning school, and they were just ecstatic. They had answered about 730,000 math questions in two weeks in order to beat out the other schools. So those teachers were 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 $100,000 tech grant from Prodigy. 

For the full interview with Rohan, visit Edtech Insiders.