[ryporter]

What led you to decide to make the app social? The competitive nature of challenging your friends seems like it would often poorly. (I recall a lot of jealousy when I was in school.) Would your product also be effective in "single-player" mode? Or, maybe you could structure it so that the child is competing with themselves (i.e., trying to best their prior scores).

[sluzorz]

So the app is social because of it's matchmaking mode. You're right about the jealousy part and we decided that it's more beneficial to be playing against a national pool. Amongst high schoolers, we found that students consistently play more because they want to win (or alleviate the pain of losing).

Single player was an idea of ours, but there are a bunch of apps out there like that already. Once our new version comes out (that contains our weekly leaderboard challenges), we might revisit that idea. Some of those challenges include beating your last week's accuracy, etc. ;)

[ryporter]

Playing against a national pool is a great idea. That alleviates my concerns about jealousy.

I play chess online, using a mode where the site will automatically match me up with another player of similar strength. It's a lot of fun, because almost all of my games are competitive. It seems like it should be easy for you to have some sort of rating system for matching up players, and ratings are also a great way to track your own personal progress. What are your plans along these lines?

[sluzorz]

We actually keep track of everything behind each question you answer. Topics, time, etc. Every game actually adapts to both players' weaknesses. We can actually sway games through this.