“Why can I fail the same game level 30 times and keep going, but quit studying after one wrong answer?”
That was our post on Reddit, with no product and no link. Trackforge is what we built around the answers: short study games for your phone, where a wrong answer tells you why and you go again.
The brief
Build It is a community sprint at the IEC at MBZUAI in Masdar City. Teams get about five weeks and three workshops to find out whether real people want their idea, then three minutes on Demo Day to show what they found. It is judged on the evidence, not the product.
Our idea started as a text adventure that generates a learning track on any topic. The sprint’s first homework was to post the problem where real people would see it, before building anything.
What I did
Trackforge was Aleksandr’s idea, and he led it: he built the games and the site, and ran each decision past the rest of us. The four of us shaped it together. My part was the research and the design direction.
- Set the team’s course through the sprint. I read the handbook and the past winners, then turned each workshop’s homework into a short brief the team could act on.
- Shaped the game. I reviewed about fifteen early mockups and picked what to keep: mistakes as creatures to fight, a stakes dial, a one-thumb battle for phones. I proposed the home screen as a path you travel, like Slay the Spire, and a flow of questions that ends in a boss. The name Trackforge came from that thread.
- Found players. With Muaadh, I came up with messaging Redditors who had asked for study help. I sent the messages and wrote our outreach text, including the question of whether people would pay and how much.
- Turned the replies into evidence. I ranked the comments on our post, grouped them by reason, and built the findings slides we took to the second workshop. My compiled findings were the source for the Demo Day deck.
What the post showed
From Reddit’s own Post Insights for our post: 19K views, the #1 post on r/GetStudying that day, 47 shares, 123 upvotes (98% upvoted) and 49 comments.
Sixteen commenters gave one main reason each for quitting: the payoff comes too late (5), they can’t see their progress (4), games aren’t always fun (3), games are built to be fun and studying isn’t (2), and feeling stuck or stupid (2).
Two strangers we messaged played the games. One spent fifteen minutes on Night Race, then asked for an easier version when they were stuck: adaptive difficulty. The other played three of the games.
What the site showed
In its first seven days the games site had 254 visits from five countries on three continents, 91% of them from the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and more than 96 recorded game views and picks across the five games.
What changed
- “Game first, the learning is a bonus” became “the learning can’t be wrong”. One tester loved the race but called the answers questionable.
- Multiple-choice topics fit. Short-answer ones don’t, yet.
- Our rival is an AI chat people already pay for.
Where it ended up
Muaadh, Aleksandr and Liyan presented it on 27 October 2026; I had university that evening and couldn’t be there. We didn’t place. Afterwards the team wrote down what Demo Day hadn’t proven: that people come back, that they would actually pay, that the questions are always right. My own takeaway: the hard part isn’t making a study game fun, it’s finding the right game for each kind of topic.