The Game: Amazing pets, epic battles and … math practice? That’s Prodigy, the no-cost math game where kids can earn prizes, go on quests and play with friends — all while learning math. With Prodigy math homework is disguised as a video-game. Loved by over a million teachers and 50 million students around the world, kids have fun and get rewards by correctly answering skill-building math questions. The best part? All of our educational content is completely zero cost. Math practice used to be a struggle — but not anymore. With Prodigy it’s easy to learn math!
My Contributions
A very unique online game, designed to be a fun free-to-play turn-based / team-based RPG at its core, but to also teach Math to kids between Grades 1 and 8. Prodigy runs directly from the web and is very accessible to kids anywhere, with access to any form of hardware with internet connection and a browser - from iPads to Chromebooks.
It's a privilege and a great opportunity to bring all myyears of experience in video game development and the video game business to help many more millions of kids learn Math, and to help many more millions of teachers to engage their classrooms in an ever-more-challenging world for educators.
Design & UX
Product & Production
Data & Engineering
As Director of Game Design in my second year in the company, Leading the creative vision for the RPG game and for Systems Design, with a long term approach for resource flows and depth for a greater experience: more playtime, more replay value, more educational value;
Managing the pitch process, backlog sourcing and grooming of initiatives of high value;
Coordinating game design efforts with educational experts;
Spearheaded the efforts to re-build all economy spreadsheets and control models for resource balancing in Excel;
Spearheading the usage of AI and LLMs into multiple stages of game design, from initial proposals all the way to wrangling JSONs to the game from Excel tables;
Leveraging AI to build prototypes of new UX and new mechanics.
As a Product Director in my second year in the company, coordinating a team of 60+ game developers: everyday production challenges, conflict resolution, resource allocation and mid-to-long-term planning;
Planning the long-term strategy and the feature portfolio for the RPG game, translating the company's objectives into development roadmaps;
Market and trends research aided by AI (Gemini and Claude);
As a Product Owner in my first year in the company, I led a squad of 10 developers for over a year, contributing key features to the main RPG game, such as a Battle Pass system (Treasure Track), a new game mode (Wizard Dash) and a new educational tool for teachers (Quick Quiz);
My squad have also conducted a large revision of long-standing Live Ops practices, re-organizing events and asset plan in a 2-year Live Ops cycle, re-routing development bandwidth into higher ROI efforts;
Hiring of other Product Owners, Producers and Data Analysts.
Balancing applied data science, A/B tests and quantitative analysis of results, with field UX research, usability tests and qualitative data;
Built custom BI dashboards and ad-hoc notebooks using Databricks;
Data analysis of player progression and AB test results assessment using Python, Pandas, PyPlot and Seaborn;
Creation of custom chatbots in Gemini (Gems) to help game designers research and assess their designs against the cognitive limitations of children from 6 to 9 years old, by consulting child developmental theories and academic studies.
