According to a recent news release, the couple is making Boom Learning available to schools for free for a limited time amid recent closures and the spread of the COVID-19 omicron variant. The Oemigs said the platform had been free to individual teachers for the last few months of the 2019-2020 school year, which greatly expanded its user base. Schools and individuals can redeem the offer through the end of February, the company noted in an email to Government Technology.
Mary said the decision to expand the free promotion came after hearing about ongoing challenges with maintaining student participation in class during remote learning, as well as the need to tackle learning loss that’s become a primary concern for K-12 across the country and globally.
She said the company experienced approximately 2,500 percent revenue growth from 2019 to 2020 as teachers looked to federal relief funding and other sources to purchase digital learning tools. Part of the reason the platform has been useful, according to Mary, is the way in which Boom Card activities help students retain information.
“One thing we do in the design of all of our products is have students engage in what’s called ‘overlearning.’ This is where you do something more times than you need to learn it, so it’s permanent in your brain," she said. "It allows students to keep what they learned longer so that they can move ahead better and faster."
Mary said Boom Learning features about 400,000 lessons and activities on its websites, with more than 10 million students and 1.5 million teachers reporting to have used the platform. While most of the program’s user base is based in the U.S., she said, 7 percent of its users are in Canada and others live in Australia.
Eric said the success of Boom Cards has been rewarding.
"We have deep roots in education. Our parents are educators. Both of us wanted to be educators,” he said. "Mary had founded a private school with some of our friends to educate our kids, and when our kids got old enough and I left the state senate, we asked ourselves, 'Where do we want to go? What do we want to do for our next act?’ We decided we wanted to leverage and improve schooling. We want to disrupt the education industry."
While game-based learning programs have grown in popularity over the pandemic, Eric said he likes to think of the platform as a personal assistant to teachers in addition to being a tool for students.
“We’re doing the grading for the teacher, and we’re helping get them the information they need for report cards,” he said, comparing use of the platform to creating a PowerPoint. “We talk to teachers on a daily basis, and they love the performance and progress reports ... The teachers save an immense amount of time, and the students get instant feedback.”
