Investing in Education Apps for Kids

In this article, I will explore the intrinsic motivations that drive kids to learn from apps without external influences like parents, teachers, or material rewards. As a parent of two boys, aged 13 and 9, I’ve closely observed their app usage and noted what motivates them and their peers.

I strive to share meaningful insights here, and naturally, some patterns emerge from my experiences as both a parent and a developer-turned-investor.

Kids education apps landscape

Dividing the landscape of kids’ education apps, we can categorize the end users into three distinct groups: preschoolers, elementary to junior high students, and high school to college students. Each group presents unique challenges, particularly in how users eventually graduate out of these apps, because they just age out. The key challenge lies in developing a high enough lifetime value for each user to justify meaningful user acquisition.

Successful forever apps can retain users for decades, and this should be the aim for any venture-backed education app company. In the kids’ app space, it’s crucial to start targeting users as soon as they reach an age where education becomes significant, with parental support and willingness to invest. Understanding how motivations evolve over time is essential.

For preschoolers, play is the primary motivator, and they have not yet been influenced by peer pressure toward games like Fortnite or Roblox. Conversely, high school and college students are more driven by grades and academic success, aiming for admission to preferred schools. However, grade motivation isn’t as strong as play.

A universally effective approach, demonstrated by Duolingo’s $15 billion market cap success with gamified education, is to combine play with learning. The challenge remains: how do we create educational apps that motivate kids through both play and learning?

My insights

Here are some insights I’ve been thinking about, when I scout for great companies in the kids education space to invest in with our VC firm, F4 Fund.

1. Understanding How Kids Choose Apps

When adults think about children’s apps, we often focus on educational value, safety features, and age-appropriate content. Yet the reality of how kids choose and stick with apps is far more nuanced. At its core, children’s app engagement follows the principles of Self-Determination Theory (SDT), a framework that explains what truly motivates humans of any age.

I’ll break down the SDT framework into something I call the three pillars of engagement.

Agency: The Power of Control

Kids crave control in a world where most decisions are made for them. Apps that succeed with kids give them meaningful choices and a sense of autonomy. This isn’t just about choosing characters or skins – it’s about letting kids decide their path, set their own goals, and feel like they’re in charge of their experience. When children feel this sense of agency, they’re more likely to develop intrinsic motivation to keep using the app.

Competence: The Mastery Journey

Kids are naturally drawn to experiences where they can see themselves improving. This explains why games like Minecraft or Fortnite have such staying power – they provide clear pathways to mastery. Each small skill development builds confidence, and visible progress (new levels reached, beating harder opponents, or new abilities) reinforces their sense of growing competence. The key is creating a learning curve that’s challenging enough to be engaging but not so difficult that it becomes frustrating.

Relatedness: The Social Factor

Perhaps the most powerful driver of app adoption among children is peer influence. They want to use apps that connect them to their social world. This might mean:

• Using apps their friends are talking about
• Engaging with content recommended by their favorite YouTubers or TikTokers
• Being part of shared experiences they can discuss at school
• Having achievements they can share with their peer group

Self-Determination Theory explains why many well-intentioned educational apps stumble. Parents might choose apps based on educational merits, but if these apps don’t satisfy children’s fundamental needs for agency, competence, and relatedness, they’re likely to gather digital dust. The most common scenario? A parent downloads an educational app, the child uses it when required, but engagement quickly fades because the app lacks the fundamental elements that drive voluntary usage. (Later, I’ll explain why this is a feature, not a bug, in the current landscape of VC-backed education startups, particularly those focused on kids.)

The most successful kids’ apps spread through peer networks like wildfire. When children see their friends engaged with an app, it creates powerful social proof. This explains why apps that might seem of-putting to adults can become absolute obsessions for kids – they’re not just using an app, they’re participating in a shared cultural experience with their peers.

A landmark study by Lepper and colleagues demonstrated that adding external rewards to activities children already enjoyed actually decreased their intrinsic interest. Rather than relying heavily on points and prizes, successful apps need to make the core experience itself intrinsically rewarding through agency, mastery, and social connection.

2. The Business Challenges

One of the fundamental challenges in children’s edtech is the disconnect between who pays for the app (parents) and who uses it (children). This creates a unique dynamic where:

a. Parents make purchase decisions based on educational potential

b. Children make usage decisions based on enjoyment and social factors (SDT)

c. The resulting gap leads to low engagement despite paid subscriptions

Many edtech companies tout impressive subscription numbers, but dig deeper and you’ll find a concerning pattern:

• Parents sign up with high hopes for their children’s learning
• Kids use the app sporadically or abandon it entirely
• Parents forget to cancel or maintain the subscription out of guilt or hope

These “zombie subscriptions” create an illusion of success while masking real engagement problems and startups neglect the need of true engagement and focus mainly on minimizing subscriber churn through UA, possibly running campaigns optimized for “Parents who forget to cancel or maintain the subscription out of guilt or hope.”

Many VCs see the children’s edtech market through an oversimplified lens: it’s a large target market (parents want the best for their kids) with a clear value proposition (better education outcomes) and a recurring revenue model (subscriptions).

However, this surface-level analysis misses crucial challenges: High customer acquisition costs due to parents’ careful decision-making, with poor retention due to lack of genuine user engagement and limited viral growth due to dependency on parent-to-parent recommendations rather than kid-to-kid enthusiasm.

Successful models need to fundamentally rethink their approach to children’s educational apps. They must simultaneously satisfy both parents’ educational concerns and children’s desire for engaging experiences.

3. Entertainment vs Education: A False Dichotomy

While parents might see Roblox as “just a game,” kids are actively developing crucial skills. They’re learning basic coding principles through game creation, developing digital literacy and creativity, building entrepreneurial skills through the platform’s economy, and engaging in collaborative problem-solving. This organic learning happens precisely because it’s not framed as educational content.

The entertainment vs. education dichotomy persists because parents feel guilty about “fun” screen time, educational institutions favor traditional learning approaches, and some education companies might fear being labeled as “just games.” Yet successful products have shown that engagement and learning aren’t mutually exclusive. Entertainment mechanics drive regular usage, while learning happens organically through play. Social features create sustainable engagement, and clear mastery pathways keep users coming back.

The most promising opportunity in children’s learning apps lies in bridging this false divide. Successful apps will create experiences that feel like games to children while delivering educational value that satisfies parents. They’ll build in social features that drive organic growth and maintain the engagement mechanics of entertainment apps while delivering genuine learning outcomes. This understanding reveals why traditional educational apps often fail – they’re too focused on delivering explicit educational value at the expense of the entertainment and social features that actually drive engagement. The future belongs to products that can seamlessly blend both worlds, recognizing that the most effective learning happens when children don’t realize they’re being taught.

4. The “Duolingo for Kids” Opportunity

A fascinating opportunity emerges when we examine why a “Duolingo for Kids” hasn’t dominated the market yet. The key lies in understanding a crucial perceptual gap between parents and children. Parents view such an app through the lens of their own learning aspirations – the “I’ll do this for a year and finally speak Spanish” fantasy, which leads millions of adults to enjoy Duolingo. They project this same aspiration onto their children, imagining their kids diligently practicing language skills like they’d do.

Children, however, would approach such an app entirely differently. To them, it would simply be another game – one that happens to teach language. This misalignment between parent and child perceptions creates a unique market opportunity. A successful app could leverage this gap, designing gameplay mechanics that deeply engage children while maintaining the educational veneer that appeals to parents.

The Screen Time Advantage

Perhaps the most compelling opportunity lies in how educational apps interact with the modern family’s approach to screen time. Parents typically set strict limits on entertainment screen time, carefully rationing hours spent on games like Roblox or Fortnite. However, educational apps often exist in a separate category – they might get their own “time bucket” outside of entertainment restrictions.

This separate categorization could enable a powerful advantage. While games compete fiercely for a child’s limited entertainment screen time, educational apps have a chance to operate in their own protected space. Parents, driven by fears of their children falling behind academically, are more likely to grant additional screen time for educational purposes. This dynamic means a “Duolingo for Kids” wouldn’t compete directly with popular games for time and attention – it would create its own new time allocation.

The Hidden Value Proposition

By designing an experience that children genuinely want to engage with – one that satisfies their needs for agency, competence, and relatedness – while maintaining the educational legitimacy that parents require, an app could capture this untapped market. The key is in the careful balance: educational enough to earn its own screen time allocation, but engaging enough that children actively choose to use it.

This is where traditional educational apps have missed the mark. They focus too heavily on the educational aspects, forgetting that their primary users – children – need to be intrinsically motivated to engage. A successful “Duolingo for Kids” would need to flip this script, prioritizing engagement while cleverly weaving in educational content.

But it’s not about tricking either party. It’s about creating genuine value that satisfies both parents’ educational goals and children’s entertainment needs. The opportunity is clear: create an app that parents categorize as educational but children experience as entertainment.

5. The School Distribution Advantage and Disadvantage

Finally, I want to address the teachers, who often are involved as a key component in startups that build for kids education. In a way, the educational app landscape has evolved into two distinct paths: the teacher-distributed model and the pure consumer approach. While companies like Duolingo pursue a D2C strategy similar to mobile gaming, apps that target teachers as their distribution channel face a different set of opportunities and challenges.

When teachers adopt and recommend an educational app, it creates a powerful distribution channel that simultaneously influences both parents and children. Teacher endorsement lends credibility that’s difficult to achieve through traditional marketing, effectively addressing both the educational legitimacy parents seek and the classroom integration children need.

In contrast, pure consumer apps like Duolingo deliberately bypass the educational system entirely. They approach distribution like free-to-play mobile games, focusing on viral mechanics, SEO/ASO and performance marketing for user acquisition. This approach offers more freedom in product design and monetization but sacrifices the institutional credibility that comes with teacher adoption.

However, the teacher distribution path isn’t without significant challenges. The space is highly competitive, with numerous established players vying for limited teacher attention and school budgets. Success requires cumbersome adherence to:

• Strong alignment with curriculum standards
• Robust classroom management features
• Evidence of learning outcomes
• Professional development support
• Complex sales cycles with multiple stakeholders

Most importantly, the shortcomings for venture-scale outcomes stem from fundamental business model constraints. Limited lifetime value is inherent to educational products – students eventually graduate or age out of the content. Scalability remains uncertain due to the fragmented nature of educational systems, varying curriculum requirements across regions, and the high-touch nature of educational sales. Additionally, the seasonal nature of school purchasing cycles creates lumpy revenue patterns that can challenge sustainable growth. This explains why many successful educational technology companies end up building sustainable businesses but struggle to deliver the outsized returns that characterize venture home runs.

If you look into the D2C side of the market, the freedom to focus solely on engagement and individual user experience can outweigh the benefits of institutional distribution for many VC backed educational products.

Final words

The success of platforms like Roblox offers a compelling blueprint for the future of kid’s learning apps. While not explicitly educational, Roblox has mastered the art of sustained engagement through player agency, clear mastery paths, and strong social features. Educational apps need not copy Roblox’s specific mechanics, but they should understand how it satisfies children’s fundamental psychological needs.

The most successful apps will be those that acknowledge and embrace the complexities of screen time, engagement and distribution rather than trying to simplify them away. They’ll create experiences that feel like games to children while delivering the educational outcomes parents seek, all while building sustainable business models that can support continuous innovation and improvement.