BlitzBowl is a global online academic competition for middle school and high school students. Students are matched on skill level and compete head-to-head in real-time to see who can answer questions fastest.
Thanks Kat!!
👋 Hi Product Hunters!
Going through school, it seemed like the majority of what we learned had no real purpose besides helping us pass our exams. Thinking back on it, grades and some far-off promise of a good college/job were weak motivators in getting students to actually get excited about learning. It wasn't until I started doing competitions like MathCounts and Science Bowl that things became fun and I felt like I had a good reason to apply myself. Problem was, these competitions only happened once a year.
In the last 3 weeks, we've created BlitzBowl to take the feeling of participating in those competitions and make it consistent and accessible to all students! We want to build a community where any student can find peers who are just like them—interested in exactly the same subjects and activities as they are, so that they can motivate and push each other to reach as high as they can. 😊
🏆 Where we're at and where we want to go
In the past 3 weeks, we've built a beta and launched. For now, we're sticking to multiple choice questions from various STEM fields (ex. physics, bio, chem, earth/space, etc.) because they're easy to validate.
In the future, we want to allow users to compete head-to-head in any activity, not just STEM subjects. For example, an audience can watch two writers compose a short story in real-time, and judge them based on who has the more compelling story. We can judge musicians live streaming their performances in the same way. We want to allow students to compete on the things they love, and have fun while doing it.
👀 A quick note on coronavirus
Coronavirus is seriously going to disrupt day-to-day life as we know it, and things are just getting started. Schools across the nation are closing and students are sitting at home quarantined. We want to help students simultaneously stay committed to learning while spending time with their friends. We're already seeing a good amount of usage from kids in Seattle, and we hope to replicate this around the world.
🙋♂️ How you can help
Please play our game! It's our belief that most of you would've been/still are the perfect user of this platform. Please comment below with any thoughts, we're working on this 24/7 and would love to iterate on your feedback and feature requests as fast as possible. 🔥
Thanks, Akshath 💙
Insanely addictive!! Couldn’t stop playing games against @brian_li3! Something super sticky about the fact that games are short and you never want to be on the losing end of the streak. And even for people not in school, lot of fun nostalgia in trying to recall that information from science + math classes. Wish I had this in high school and can see it becoming super popular esp given that students will lose a lot of their fun social interactions in coming months. Amazing work, looking forward to seeing where this goes :)
Hi Akshath and Ali! This is amazing timing. Parents with fulltime jobs are in shock about how to both entertain their kids, and continue their education. This would work so well. Congrats on the quick growth!!
Am I able to add custom set of questions? That would be such a cool additional feature 😍. Especially if I can publish them / share my qs with others.
@helenamerk Thanks for the kind words Helena! Custom questions sets is definitely on the roadmap, will put ability to share them with each other on there as well 😊
Trove
Glimpse
Trove
twine
Trove