The greatest learning. Building Kahoot! for neurodiversity.

Kahoot! has been selected for the Lego Foundations Play for All Program focused on developing solutions for neurodivergent children, with a special focus on ADHD learners. This is a huge testament and validation for Kahoot’s inclusive pedagogy and product design that We Are Human developed as part of our founding role of Kahoot!. 

We broke so many fundamental rules of what is accepted from a learning platform and behaviour in the classroom to ensure we captured the attention of all learners. Letting them choose to engage in learning in the most natural way for them. We carefully designed the game-based pedagogy and product to enable the core behaviours a teacher seeks to validate learning happening by tapping into learners core motivators. 

Up until the last decade the traditional formal learning situation (with honourable exemptions) has confined the teachers & students to only enable a very one-dimensional learning environment, leaving particular groups unserved and under-utilised. Resulting in drop-outs, conflict, and depressed learners with low self-esteem in learning contexts. The Kahoot! founding team and early employees were a diverse group, not culturally or gender, but neurological which is our most fundamental human diversity. 

The greatest learning is that the culture we build, the language we develop, is as important as the code we develop. 

We knew that to create systemic change we had to get into the system, enable it to change from within, to self-discover the true potential in thinking & acting different. What we once thought (and maybe was) the right way of teaching to meet society’s demands, is now outdated and constrained by a systemic inability to adapt to an ever changing and accelerating society. 50 to 100 years ago the various of routes to learning & developing as human beings and work to sustain a life was actually much wider than now. The restless & creative, handy & adventures, sensitive & empathetic among us could find their own way, by going to sea, the woods, farming and so on. Now we all “need” a degree to be accepted & selected, forcing the population into a narrow path designed for the few, and leaving a trail of failed kids and adults behind. 

Kahoot! was designed as a Trojan horse, notionally to enable formative assessment and classroom management, but in reality to enable the disengaged learner at back of the classroom to come to the front for all the right reasons. We refused to marked Kahoot! as a special needs product, even though our competitive advantage was an inclusive design strategy, we leveraged the exceptional qualities neurologically diverse students inhabit to bring the classroom together in powerful social learning situation.

The formative assessment quiz was designed as our user acquisition product, to embed Kahoot! into the daily routine of the classroom environment. Allowing us to build a brand platform with the license to teach. The ambition was to over time keep innovating on how to break the rules, enable the wildly diverse group of learners, and to be used as naturally used in social gatherings, as learning situations and business contexts. 

We believe how we learn is as important as what we learn.

The Kahoot! platform enabled personalisation of the national & standardised curriculum, making it hyper local and thus relevant to learners. It allowed learners to take on the play personality most naturally to them, as game creators, researchers, directors and hosts. Allowing the teachers to not only perform exit tickets and formative assessments live, but more importantly evaluate the multidimensional ability of learners as they transitioned through the different gaming modes as players, creators and hosts. Maybe most crucial to our success we enabled teachers to become hero’s by sharing their experience, tips and contents with an ever growing community (now surpassing 7 million teachers globally). 

We are referenced in numerous research paper, books and professional teacher statements as a core platform to enable the neurodiverse learners, we have been described as nirvana for engaging ADHD learners. However most importantly from the parents and learners themselves. We early on received letters from parents, one from a mother telling us how their young autistic daughter had never won anything, never been seen in the class for her abilities and knowledge, never felt accepted as one of many. Then Kahoot! came long. I shed a tear then for having the honour to be involved, and I still get emotional thinking back at that defining moment.

There is no such thing as normal person

We understood a critical component of systemic change, that language is the code that society runs on. Change particular words and sentences describing something and with time you reprogram the understanding, and how we behave, act and evolve. 

We refused to label learners, instead we described behaviours, and learning styles. When people ask me now what is the most powerful thing I can do to help my disengaged learner, those who don’t feel mastery. I ask them to change how they talk, stop saying people have a diagnosis, when they are just a natural variation. People don’t have ADHD, most people don’t have learning disabilities, they have a different way learning. 

I am dyslexic, I am a ADHD person, I am ambidextrous, I am short, I am multicultural. We talk about what does not fit into a narrow box as a sickness, functional disability. There is no such thing as normal person, we have not found a normal genom 🧬 profile. We live in a society that is obsessed with putting a diagnosis on everything that does not fit a culturally designed narrowing perception of normality. We have an extremely ugly past of treating those different to us, and we still commit those crimes.

The fire in my belly, my personal vision, drive and ambition to right this wrong, to be part of the solution and not the problem, left me extremely vulnerable early in my career. However it also resulted in what I am the most proud of. I am so proud I was part of team of young people who risked our economic foundation and professional ridicule to build a platform that would enable a systemic change in how we think about learning, and what is a good learning experience & environment. One that remind everyone that learning is about what it is to be human, and connect us with our globally shared and first language, Play. 

The greatest learning is that the culture we build, the language we develop, is as important as the code we develop.