#StartupsEverywhere: Edna Martinson, Co-Founder, Boddle
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Bringing classrooms together through educational video games
The world of EdTech is an ever-growing, innovative space. Through her company, Boddle, Edna Martinson is bringing high-quality practice and assessments in English Language Arts and Mathematics to students everywhere. With over two million monthly active users, the eponymous Boddle characters are in the hearts and minds of students and teachers alike. We sat down with Edna to discuss content moderation, access to technology in the classroom, and policies impacting EdTech.
Tell us about your background. What led you to Boddle?
We were founded in 2018 in Kansas City, Missouri. It took us two years to launch because we didn't have any money. At that time, we were doing pitch competitions and accelerator programs trying to raise enough funds to build out the platform. We finally had a minimum viable product that we could put out in 2020. Our work is still capital-intensive because we're building full-3D video games. The capital we raised in 2020 allowed us to build out the platform more and then focus on getting teachers and students on the platform as well.
What is the work you all are doing at Boddle?
Boddle is a learning gaming platform for education focused on building fun, interactive learning experiences for kindergarten through sixth-grade students. We use games as a medium to provide teachers with the resources that they need to help them better facilitate learning. Boddle lets them see where their students are at and how they're performing. We want to reach as wide an audience as possible.
Our business model is freemium, there's a free version for all kids, regardless of demographic, school district, or location. Parents have the option to pay for additional subscriptions or in-app purchases for their kids for additional gaming features.
We're working on releasing more multiplayer experiences like our current player versus player (PvP) mode, as well as an upcoming racing game where the whole class can play together and practice their math facts as a class.
How does Boddle handle content moderation?
Boddle has mainly been a single-player experience with multi-user components. There are visual leaderboards and statistics. Player interaction is limited to seeing how your friends are doing in their games and playing against each other in a PvP mode.
Even without a specific chat function, we have to think about content moderation–even around something as simple as usernames.
There are the obvious ones. We had to take out colors because people were using black and white inappropriately. We also had to remove certain animals, like pigs. We’re cognizant of getting teacher feedback on which usernames we should allow. We rely on them to tell us when new slang pops up. Kids are incredibly creative; any two random words for their username could be part of their lingo. With Gen Alphas, we have to remove words all the time because all of a sudden a certain word means something bad now. We also have teachers on our team who are there to help us flag phrases that should not be allowed as usernames.
Have you faced any challenges expanding platform accessibility for classrooms?
AT&T and other organizations have stepped in over the years to close the digital divide in classrooms, ensuring that learning environments are better connected to the internet. The hardware they use, however, is a different story.
While we do have minimum device requirements, we spent most of 2020 and 2021 optimizing Boddle to run on old, slow Chromebooks that have seen wear and tear in the classroom. That was a big challenge for us in the early years right after launch. Now, we’re in a good spot where we know our program can run on both older and newer devices.
What are some challenges navigating data privacy rules as a small business?
Navigating state and local policy can be very tedious. It would save us so much time if there was a way to just be able to get all the information on the things that could be affecting us soon. I never want us to miss something and be told we’re non-compliant on something because we didn’t know about it.
We need data privacy agreements, but there’s no uniformity. I get DPA’s from multiple school districts daily. Some states have created uniform statewide agreements, but there are some other states with no uniformity. In those states, we have to read each school district's DPA separately. Uniform standards would make the lives of those of us in EdTech a lot easier. We want to comply with the law, but we need it to be accessible. Some of these district DPA’s are so poorly written–I’ve gotten agreements that are in a Word file that's still red-lined.
Sometimes the districts don’t even understand what they’re sending, they just know it needs to be signed. You’d expect for EdTech working at the state level we’d have to sign 50 agreements, but in reality, it’s hundreds upon hundreds because every school has their own little thing that they add in there.
Do you use AI for any part of the Boddle platform? How could AI be used to help the education sector?
There are huge potential use cases for AI in education. For several years, we’ve been exploring how machine learning can make our platform more adaptive. Right now, we're using it internally as a tool for content generation and to make it faster to produce educational content that our team can go and qualify.
We're excited to see in 2025 how it could really help teachers better facilitate learning and an even larger space to explore how AI could actually be used to help students as well.
What do you wish policymakers knew about the ed tech space?
We want to inspire kids to use learning games inside and outside of the classroom. It's easy to be skeptical about technology and games in the education space. But we know that the number one thing kids spend time on outside of the classroom is gaming. Why not bring an educational experience into the space that kids want to spend most of their time in?
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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