His students called him "Mr. Roro." Then he built the digital notebook that lets one teacher watch thirty kids think at once.
Open Classkick during a live lesson and the screen fills with tiny canvases - one per student, all updating at once. A kid in the third row erases a wrong answer. A kid by the window is stuck on step two. The teacher sees both in real time and drops a handwritten note, an audio clip, or a quick chat into the exact spot where the student is working. Andrew Rowland built that. He is the founder and CEO of Classkick, and he runs it from Chicago.
What he is really selling is not software. It is the thing every good teacher chases and never has enough hands for: the feedback loop. The fast, specific, "try again - you're close" moment that turns a wrong answer into a learned one. Classkick's own four-word thesis says it plainly - more tries for kids, every day.
The platform reaches more than half of U.S. schools and students in over 180 countries. It runs on Firebase, the Google infrastructure that lets a small team power thousands of simultaneous, instantaneous interactions without building socket plumbing from scratch. But the origin of all of it is older and less technical than any of that. It starts with a man at the front of a room, holding a marker, wishing he could be in thirty places at once.
Source: Classkick / Google Firebase developer story. The product's core claim is volume and speed of feedback, not novelty.
Technology can do small things at a huge scale really well - like scaling 'aha' moments and feedback loops, so teachers have more time to form relationships with their students.— Andrew Rowland, founder & CEO, Classkick
Andrew Rowland did not arrive at education through a startup accelerator. He arrived through a job that nearly broke him and that he loved anyway. He studied mathematics and political economy at UC Berkeley, and on paper he was headed somewhere with a spreadsheet and a quarterly target. He even did a stint in economic consulting.
Teach for America rerouted him. He taught high school math in Chicago, started the robotics program, and learned the brutal arithmetic of the classroom: one teacher, dozens of students, and a finite number of minutes to notice who is lost before the bell rings. He has described the work as both the most rewarding and the most demanding thing he had done.
Then the school closed. Most people would have read that as an ending. Rowland read it as a syllabus. He went and learned to code, landed at Google and then YouTube, and absorbed a single engineering instinct that would define everything after: a small thing, done at enormous scale, beats a big thing that never ships. He had felt the problem with his own hands. Now he knew how to build the fix.
A teacher builds an assignment - problems, prompts, interactive canvases. Students work on their own screens. The teacher gets the bird's-eye view, and the help flows both ways: teacher to student, and student to student.
The teacher watches all student work update in real time and jumps straight to whoever is stuck.
Help lands as a handwritten mark, an audio clip, or a quick message - right where the student is working.
Students can raise a hand for a classmate's help without the social cost of asking out loud.
It works whether the class is in one room or scattered across a city - same live canvas either way.
Customizable feedback stickers and points let teachers respond fast without losing momentum.
Firebase Realtime Database and Cloud Storage power the simultaneous interactions under the hood.
Firebase is an underlying platform out of the box that powers all of these instantaneous interactions.— Andrew Rowland, in his Google / Firebase developer story
In the summer of 2014, educator Jennie Magiera told Rowland that Classkick needed an audio tool - a way to read directions aloud and give spoken prompts to primary students and English-language learners. It was not a small ask. It was the kind of request that lands in a backlog and quietly dies.
The team shipped it before the season was out. Education Week, profiling the young startup that fall, singled out exactly this: founders who listened to teachers, iterated fast, and put student learning ahead of margin. It is the clearest fingerprint of Rowland's whole approach - the teacher's request is not a feature ticket, it is the point.
He has also been willing to say the quiet part in public. One Classkick blog post carries the title "Something we got wrong." A founder owning a mistake in print, under his own byline. The instinct that makes a good teacher - admit it, fix it, try again - turns out to make a recognizable founder too.
Strip away the jargon and Rowland's argument is almost stubbornly simple. Kids learn by trying, getting feedback, and trying again. The bottleneck has never been the kids' willingness. It has been the teacher's clock. So you do not replace the teacher - you give the teacher more reach. You let one person notice thirty things at once, and you give the feedback loop the one thing it always lacked: speed.
It is a deeply teacherly worldview wearing engineering clothes. The technology is invisible on purpose. What the student feels is simply that someone noticed, fast, in the moment it mattered.
"More tries for kids, every day."
"Technology can do small things at a huge scale really well."
"Firebase is an underlying platform out of the box that powers all of these instantaneous interactions."
The founder of an app used by millions still answers, in spirit, to the nickname his teenagers gave him.
His Berkeley degree paired mathematics with political economy. He once expected a career in finance.
The school where he taught shut down. He treated it as a reason to learn to code, not a reason to quit education.
Classkick reaches 180+ countries built by a lean team that skipped complex socket infrastructure entirely.
He literally published a post called "Something we got wrong." Try finding that on most startup blogs.