Brillder was conceived at Eton College by a teacher called Joe Francis who loved teaching but wasn’t so keen on
marking. He had the idea of creating an assignment technology which marked itself. Automated marking had been
around for ages, but Joe’s idea was to create challenging content alongside questions crafted to make you think,
not just to test knowledge.
Trialling the prototype in various classes and schools, it became apparent that
students liked the competitive possibilities of the platform and would even replay bricks to improve their
scores.
The Brillder Story
When Joe met Lindsay Macvean (on a beach in Lanzarote) who had played a key early role in the global
not-for-profit education start-up, Coder Dojo, he found a natural CTO. Lindsay and Joe worked on the challenge
of trying to gamify scholarly academic content in a way which enhanced, rather than compromised, the learning
experience. They wanted ‘bricks’ to be so engaging that learners would ‘play’ them even if they were not being
set by teachers.
Joe left Eton in 2019 and persuaded Mark Wang, the founder of United World College, Changshu to fund Brillder.
Lindsay built the beta platform in 2020 with Sasha, Brillder’s Head of Design, and through 2021 Joe began to
recruit authors to build content, mainly in Maths, English, Biology, and Physics.
II
The Bridges Of Königsberg Problem
III
The Blinding Of Gloucester
In April 2022 we launched Brillder’s daily competitions. On a 24 hour cycle we add fresh content and create
fresh gamified challenges in both STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and Humanities subjects.
Bricks have already been downloaded in 30 countries and we are growing users (and authors!) fast. But we’re
still a very small company - contact us to get involved. You could be a big part of our story.