MathWiz League began as a summer math league one teacher ran by hand. It's now a real-time multiplayer platform — live head-to-head matches, leaderboards, and dashboards for students, teachers, parents, and admins. One engineer rebuilt it from scratch in a month, and has shipped new features every season since.
“David built every piece of MathWiz League from scratch — logins, money collection, registrations, passwords, all of it.”Pete Tarnowski · Founder, MathWiz League
MathWiz League didn't start as software. A teacher was already running a summer math league for his strongest students, tracking problems, scores, and standings across spreadsheets and email. It worked — but every season meant more manual work, and there was only so far it could grow that way.
He wanted to expand the league and make it easier to run — and turn math practice into something students actually got excited about: live competition, not another worksheet. That needed real software.
"Live classroom competition" sounds like one feature. It's actually a whole platform: head-to-head matches with live scoring, a question library spanning topics and difficulty levels, leaderboards that update as answers land, and separate views for students, teachers, parents, and admins — so parents can follow their student's progress from home — plus tools for running leagues and tournaments on top.
The scope was set the way every All Day Software project is: defined up front, built to production standards, and shippable the moment the core loop worked in a real classroom.
Version one launched in June 2024 — MathWiz League running on WordPress, extended with a custom plugin that added just enough competition functionality to prove the idea. It worked — but it was clunky, not much to look at, and a nightmare to maintain.
So in 2025, version two was a full rewrite from scratch, tailored to exactly how this league runs — nothing generic, nothing unused. It carries no tracking and no analytics, which keeps it fast, private, and secure, and simple enough for students, teachers, parents, and the coach running it to pick up without a manual. First commit to live: one month.
And it hasn't stood still. What launched in a month has kept growing — new features shipped season after season, from Kahoot-style live quizzes to team play — most of them a quick email or text away, designed and built solo.
Real-time infrastructure, content management, analytics, and role-based access — the whole stack, designed and built solo.
Real-time matches let many students compete at once with score tracking, live leaderboards, and dynamic result updates.
Flexible content management supports diverse question types, difficulty levels, and adaptive challenges based on performance.
Reporting and visualization surface individual and group performance, trends, and progress over time.
Separate interfaces for students, teachers, parents, and admins — parents get their own window into their student's progress.
Create and run leagues, tournaments, and practice sessions with customizable rules, scoring, and groupings.
A cloud-native architecture handles concurrent users efficiently with automatic scaling and high availability.
MathWiz League has been running in real classrooms since 2024 — six competition seasons in, with nearly 100 students competing and more than a thousand math questions answered on the platform. One engineer maintains all of it.
And it runs lean: the platform is built on serverless infrastructure that scales to zero when classrooms are quiet, so the monthly hosting bill rounds to zero. Careful engineering choices, not a bigger hosting bill, are what carry the load — the same discipline every client build gets.
A couple of years ago I had an idea to create an online math league for my super strong students — math enrichment and competition during the summers. I contacted David, and he built me a website and set up methods to deliver problems to the students. He “gamified” it for them, complete with interactive leaderboards, message boards, and trophy icons. David built every piece of MathWiz League from scratch — logins, money collection, registrations, passwords, all of it.
My goal is to keep expanding and tweaking our format, which I'm confident of because David has been incredibly responsive. If I want to change something, I shoot him an email or text and it's done quickly. I'm excited about what lies ahead for MathWiz League, and I'm already thinking of more ideas that I'm certain David will help me implement.
Fixed scope, demos on your schedule, production-grade from day one. Let's talk about it.
